When you kill Python 2, your opinion will be worth something, until then stfu
Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
51–60 of 65 posts
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#53Meh. Let's be real, PDF has its use, it's all a matter of who uses it how. That's exactly the same with HTML. Which of course is something you can't really use for digital contracts, for example.
Wouldn't it be better to educate users to choose the right software tool for the right job, instead of generalizing the problem with shortsighted assertions?
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
What mobile PDF readers do you recommend? I’ve been longing for zoom fixation and continuous scrolling but had no idea this existed in current apps.
Foxit PDF Reader does this beautifully. It's far better on iOS but still works better than the alternatives on Android. Trust me, it is a DREAM to read PDFs on mobile with Foxit. I avoided PDFs for years because iBooks and Kindle suck on mobile. Acrobat failed to even render the text in a PDF I tried so that was a non starter.
Cool! Will try Foxit then.
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#55My 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.
I've tried both pdftotext and pdf2txt and I remember not being satisfied with either. Neither seem to handle non-ASCII characters very well, but I'll take another look soon though.
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#56Smart guy, stupid tweet. If you decide to take an extreme position to attract attention or vent, at least say something intelligent.
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#57Is there a container format for HTML that includes assets such as images used in the document? I think having a single file is important. Firefox (possibly others) allow you to save a website, but you end up with a folder full of assets which isn't very user-friendly.
Replacing everything with data-uris could be an option, but this would have to be some sort of standard for documents usually sent as PDF.
Websites could then create the "raw" document and display it in an iframe, so the website's template is separated from the document.
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)
Doing forms in PDF directly is not the most unreasonable idea.
The problem is it's not one, but three ridiculously overcomplex specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Inter...
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)
Doing forms in PDF directly is not the most unreasonable idea. The problem is it's not one, but three ridiculously overcomplex specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Inter...
It's fine if it's the easiest method available with universal support. In this case in failed on both counts.
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#60Is there a container format for HTML that includes assets such as images used in the document? I think having a single file is important. Firefox (possibly others) allow you to save a website, but you end up with a folder full of assets which isn't very user-friendly. Replacing everything with data-uris could be an option, but this would have to be some sort of standard for documents usually sent as PDF. Websites cou…
KDE's konqueror has a "web archive" format. I don't think any of the other big browsers have such a thing.
http://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/html/openSUSE_113/open...