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What is the PDF format good for? Nothing (2006)

complang.tuwien.ac.at

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Re: What is the PDF format good for? Nothing (2006)

#11

Post by mrec »

nclfiididg wrote: post #2

So one of the common uses for pdf is filling in digital forms, typically published by your government. I didnt even see this addressed in the gigantic rant by author. Instead they complained about Actobat Reader for DOS is slow and other random anecdotial evidence, none which imo supports his claim that pdf is good for nothing.

What's the benefit of PDF forms over HTML forms? Other than being able to share the "digital" and dead-tree designs, which may be an advantage for someone, but not for the person filling it in.

Re: What is the PDF format good for? Nothing (2006)

#13

Post by bengillies »

I don't think it's fair to say that preserving page structure and formatting is never a good idea. For example, at least one good use for PDFs is sheet music/tabs. Formatting is obviously important here as it tends to lose meaning without it, but equally as important is the page structure and per-page nature of reading vs scrolling. As a (hobbyist) musician, when I'm playing an instrument, I don't have any free hands to scroll with, so it's important to me that I don't have to do it very often.

Re: What is the PDF format good for? Nothing (2006)

#16

Post by megaman22 »

ijafri wrote: post #4

I happen to work in an industry (intl shipping) where we scan billions of PDF daily, and I have no clue, how would we share docs with all the parties involved ... 'sanely' ... if it were not for PDF, TIFF isn't good either .. PDF docs are like 3kb-10kb ... other than physical scan of papers ... however 'generated PDF docs' are 5kb at best.

It's scary how differently PDFs can be output depending on the exporter. I have some Word docs for user and installation guides that can be 100% larger depending on whether the content writer saves it as PDF, exports it as PDF, or prints the document to a PDF.

Re: What is the PDF format good for? Nothing (2006)

#18

Post by kaitai »

Math! Math typesetting is still a huge problem -- same as back in 1997 with a few improvements here and there.

I do remember the days when postscript was far more of a default, or dvi -- there were people who refused to use pdf format at that time. Almost no one has stuck with that battle.

Standardized, high-quality math typesetting in html has still just not quite happened although it's improving continuously.

Re: What is the PDF format good for? Nothing (2006)

#19

Post by oerpli »

It seems that the post was written in 1997 [1], with some parts added in 2005 [2].

The author is generally a computer science professor with some idiosyncratic (at least for the current time) opinions. Though I enjoyed the classes I attended with him a few years ago and some of his points I found quite convincing.

For example, in the class on stack based languages (forth & postscript mostly) he also showed how using PS instead of PDF allows him to put results from the analysis in the source code of papers and generate the plots from them. I try to mimic this in my PDFs by adding shortened links to the source and data for each plot (example: [3]) as I've often been annoyed with figures in papers that omit crucial information on what they show.

[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/19971016211209/https://www.compl...

[2]: https://web.archive.org/web/20051231210211/https://www.compl...

[3]: https://i.imgur.com/CfuYeOO.png

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