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Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

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Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#31

Post by pietro »

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

From an additional tweet, we can see that Guido's biggest reason for disliking PDF is the text not being responsive. This is actually my FAVORITE thing about PDFs. They're like pages. They perfectly replicate the book medium they are often taken from. If I want to make something bigger or smaller, I can do that, and it just works with zoom. It's not trying to guess what I'm trying to do and adjust things in ways I do…

I thought I hated PDFs until I got my first Macbook and discovered Preview and two-finger zoom. Turns out, I just hated Acrobat and zooming with buttons.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#32

Post by mytddu »

My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#33

Post by creshal »

james_morton wrote: post #3

PDF was made for printing, not displaying. As someone who has been in the printing business for a long time, PDF was a god send, no more worrying about missing fonts, no more page margin differences, no more driver discrepancies. What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge .

PDF1/A is a great standard for printable documents. Because it doesn't try to do anything else.

Regular PDF with embedded flash, quicktime, HTML/XML forms and/or javascript, is a nightmare.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#34

Post by cpach »

I agree with the comments pointing out that PDF was not primarily intended for screen usage. However, it’s quite a good format for typeset text. What if the problem is not really with the format itself, but the way it us used? What if the PDF file was customized to the specific device they will be opened on?

It would probably not be impossible to take EPUB source and then convert to PDF via (La)TeX, with good typograhic settings for the specific device. For my laptop screen the page would be around 28 centimers wide, perhaps set in three or four columns. For my smartphone, one column is enough. With this setup one would not have to scroll up and down while reading the columns, which is the case now when reading e.g. scientific papers. And because of the great quality of the TeX engine it might be easier to achieve a good layout than hacking around with HTML/CSS/Javascript.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#35

Post by nitrogen »

mytddu wrote: post #32

My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?

Pdf2txt wasn't helpful?

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.h...

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#36

Post by 0xFFC »

I don't have any problem with pdf's, and I think they are wonderful, specially for reading books. They almost simulate same experience of reading old fashion book, but in computer ! I like the idea of not being responsive. Because let be honest being responsive would come with so much headache. Every device then render it in a different way.

But I think the problem is software's we use as pdf viewers. Companies tend to ignore pdf's. They think if they can render pdf's , that is enough.No it isn't. Some pdf viewer cant get fit-to-width right.It kind of feels like software companies tend to ignore pdf's.

Apple has done wonderful job with their word lookup functionality . If English is your mother tongue then you don't have fucking idea how helpful is that.

I am PC user , Ask Cortana functionality (in pdf's) in Edge made me ditch Google-Chrome for Edge entirely, and believe me I spend all day in browser 24/7 and my whole life was in chrome before ditching it. (just imagine how important that simple functionality is for non-English speakers) I don't know how to emphasize it more, but believe me, that simple Lookup (without opening new browser tab and searching for "define $word" is the most functionality most of non-English users want).

p.s. I wish google add pdf word lookup functionality to this : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#37

Post by legulere »

cpach wrote: post #21
legulere wrote: post #12

Probably it's actually the other way around. PDFs usually fulfill lots of typographic criteria for better legibility like use of justified text and ligatures that are hardly used in HTML or badly supported. The only real problems are with two column text moving around is annoying and you often have to zoom in. However with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore.

”with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore” I really can’t agree with you there. Despite that, the reading experience suffers a lot IMO.

Yeah maybe I was a bit too enthusiastic, but it's a dramatic improvement compared to before.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#40

Post by IngoBlechschmid »

mytddu wrote: post #32

My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?

Sure, the Linux tool "pdftotext" works just fine for this. Two small caveats: ligatures get converted to proper Unicode ligatures and not their ASCII fallback (as one might want or expect) and of course complex mathematical formulas are rendered badly.
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