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

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

#41

Post by SFJulie »

oneeyedpigeon wrote: post #16
jeandejean wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "A web page renderer is more ubiquitous than PDF" Just any browser can render a PDF as well. PDF is good because it guarantees the formatting intended by the author.

And PDF is bad because it guarantees the formatting intended by the author. The author's formatting might work on a single screen, but it sure as hell won't work on the multitude of devices that access the web. PDF guarantees the end print result, but it shouldn't be used for anything else.

Well letter, legal vs A4 is a concern. Some printing drivers tends to alter content in the «fitting» process making some pdf hard to read. And screen tends to be in weired and diverse height vs width ratio.

US standards are ridiculous. At least A1/A2/A3... are homothetic.

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

#42

Post by blowski »

creshal wrote: post #33
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 .

A few years back, I had to borrow someone's computer to fill out the UK passport form. It was full of extensions that only worked in the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - which wasn't available on Ubuntu (at the time). I couldn't even print the form and fill it by hand.

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

#43

Post by cpach »

legulere wrote: post #37
cpach wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

”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.

I agree :)

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

#45

Post by clockwerx »

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 .

He didnt add these important words: "on the web"

PDF as a primary info exchange format online is stupid and needs to die

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

#47

Post by girzel »

PDFs are great for reading, but nothing else. If you want to do something with the text, then plain text or some derived format is better. I would include searching as "doing something". PDF viewers can search, but it's always more painful than searching plain text, and I would say if you're using search to simply locate your subject in the file, then the file author has failed to provide a sufficient TOC/index.

To me, the case in point is the PDF documentation of LaTeX packages. The PDF files are great as a demonstration of what the package does, but they are awful for learning how to do it in your own documents. I am writing LaTeX in plain text, in an editor. I want the package documentation in plain text, in my editor. I sure as hell do not want to fire up a separate PDF viewer and then start flicking through pages, just to discover the correct package option incantations.

I love PDFs, but I only love them as a prose reading experience: open the file, start at the top, read until the end. When I make PDFs for other people to consume, I usually make three different layouts: print, screen, and tablet/mobile. Thanks to LaTeX, that's easy to do.

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

#49

Post by sambeau »

All these people pointing out that PDF was for printing, not for screen display, are I believe (at least partly) incorrect. I distinctly remember PDF being touted as a screen display technology.

Adobe (and the world) already had a printable format: Postscript. But PostScript was interpreted and had loops and other programming constructs that made it hard to stream and to add hyperlinks to. PDF was explained to us as 'unrolled Postscript'. PDF was also claimed to be much faster to display as it didn't require a interpreter although NeXT (and SGi) used 'Display Postscript' for their windowing systems.

As someone who was involved in print media at the time the font & raster-image embedding was also a godsend but that was a characteristic of the PDF file format rather than the PDF drawing technology.

PDF was deemed so suitable as a display technology that the Mac OS X window server was hailed as 'Display PDF' on launch and a big deal was made of how a Mac could not only display exactly what a printer would show but that high-resolution printing was already built in: everything was essentially already being printed to the screen. Although seldom mentioned theses days I assume the Quartz 2D render is still Display PDF?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

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

#50

Post by girzel »

darkhorn wrote: post #38

I don't like PDFs but you can sign them with certificates. This makes them great for busness contracts.

You can sign any lump of plain text with a GPG signature. I know I'm dreaming here, but...

Honest question: How much traction has PDF-plus-certificate gained versus plaint-text-plus-signature?

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