The fact that you have to pay to see the standard should tell you everything you need to know.
that it's an ISO standard and everyone just implements the most recent draft?
What's even the point of having standards if only rich people can read them?
Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
91–100 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#92The PDF spec is officially available here: http://www.adobe.com/go/pdfreference There’s also this book which provides a good introduction and overview and is useful for understanding how the format works (although the PDF reference itself is pretty decent too, as far as specs go): https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/developing-with-pdf/978... (You can find a PDF copy if you look around.) EDIT: There’s also https://w…
> The PDF spec is officially available here: When did this happen? I swear some years ago I looked and it was a $300 standard?
The ISO version costs money, but the virtually identical Adobe version is available freely. I believe that has been the case since at least when version 1.7 was published in 2008.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#93Years ago I wrote a PDF generator for Passepartout (http://www.stacken.kth.se/project/pptout/) from reading the PDF book. I though it was a well designed format. It is a binary format though, for the sake of efficiency.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#94To everyone thinking about writing their own code to generate PDF, I'm begging you, please either implement tagged PDF support for accessibility, and test it with Adobe Reader and a screen reader, or consider using an existing PDF generator that supports tagged PDF, such as LibreOffice, iText, or a recent version of Chromium. The web already has enough untagged, inaccessible PDFs to provide no shortage of work for multiple document remediation businesses, including my own. But I'm an accessibility advocate first, and as the saying goes, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's certainly true that there are a lot of PDF renderers out there with subtle incompatibilities (and bugs), and also a lot of PDF files with subtle nonconformances. However, that doesn't seem like a good reason to not write a new PDF generator! Instead, write a conformant one. Better, write one that not only conforms, but also isn't affected by any of the bugs in popular PDF renderers, by testing against all of the…
> against Adobe's implementation Hard to automate, Windows, macOS and Linux versions have differences > Foxit No Linux version, even harder automation than Adobe's
Yeah, that would explain it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#96The PDF spec is officially available here: http://www.adobe.com/go/pdfreference There’s also this book which provides a good introduction and overview and is useful for understanding how the format works (although the PDF reference itself is pretty decent too, as far as specs go): https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/developing-with-pdf/978... (You can find a PDF copy if you look around.) EDIT: There’s also https://w…
It's certainly true that there are a lot of PDF renderers out there with subtle incompatibilities (and bugs), and also a lot of PDF files with subtle nonconformances. However, that doesn't seem like a good reason to not write a new PDF generator! Instead, write a conformant one. Better, write one that not only conforms, but also isn't affected by any of the bugs in popular PDF renderers, by testing against all of the…
That’s just a sanity check though, not an actual conformance test.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#97The PDF spec is officially available here: http://www.adobe.com/go/pdfreference There’s also this book which provides a good introduction and overview and is useful for understanding how the format works (although the PDF reference itself is pretty decent too, as far as specs go): https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/developing-with-pdf/978... (You can find a PDF copy if you look around.) EDIT: There’s also https://w…
I think Skia's PDF render support isn't fully compliant with the specification, and that's a Google product with dozens of Google engineers working on it.
Can you comply with a subsection of the specification?
I guess my point is that nobody will care to create an app with attention to the hundreds/thousands of programming tasks required for full compliance with a 600 page specification...
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's certainly true that there are a lot of PDF renderers out there with subtle incompatibilities (and bugs), and also a lot of PDF files with subtle nonconformances. However, that doesn't seem like a good reason to not write a new PDF generator! Instead, write a conformant one. Better, write one that not only conforms, but also isn't affected by any of the bugs in popular PDF renderers, by testing against all of the…
That’s just a sanity check though, not an actual conformance test.
While I agree that it's not an actual conformance test, in the sense that it won't detect deviations from the spec that all of the parsers forgive (for example, using a space instead of a line ending between "startxref" and the offset of the xrefs), it is in many cases more rigorous than an actual conformance test, because there are dark corners of the PDF spec that no PDF renderer implements correctly.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#99If you're comfortable handling the (typo)graphical aspects of the PDF yourself and have the ability to consume a C++ library, I've had good experiences using the Apache-licensed qpdf[1] library to handle the low-level structural aspects of the PDF standard. It's particularly convenient when your application requires structure-preserving integration of existing PDF content.
Simple example applications, each completed in 2–3 days, both in C#, using C++/CLI to integrate libqpdf:
1. Overlaying fixed-format text on pre-existing blank PDF form pages, ensuring the content of each distinct form page is embedded exactly once, and that all necessary assets (fonts, images, etc.) from the blank form PDF pages are included in the output PDF.
2. Losslessly combining a sequence of PDF, TIFF, and JPEG images into a single PDF with bookmarks pointing to the first page of each source file and existing image compression maintained where possible. In this application, only the source TIFFs were anything other than arbitrary (i.e., the TIFFs were more-or-less baseline images coming from a small number of scanning systems, but the JPEGs and PDFs came from all sorts of different applications).
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
> If age mattered (which it doesn't) then PDF's latest update was published on 2020, which is far fresher than XML's spec. Standards are dragged down by their oldest version, not the newest. EDIT: Sorry, that was a nice punchline but didn't actually explain very well. My point is that unless they actually start over, which almost never happens, newer versions tend to just be more layers of stuff to deal with. It's no…
> Standards are dragged down by their oldest version, not the newest. Not really, specially if you keep in mind that newer standards have erratas and newer versions, like PDF 2.0, deprecate features.
How's that going for JPEG2000? HTTP2? IPv6?
Not saying they don't have adoption, but to this day you are debilitatingly limiting yourself if you ignore the older ones, and their cruft.