At first, I thought it said edible PDF, but I didn't think a closed format would taste very good.
The Editable PDF Initiative
11–20 of 162 posts
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a better format for displaying and printing documents consistently and with selectable text? > It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes That is a feature. I expect my PDFs to display with pixel-perfect consistency everywhere. There are other formats that adapt to screen sizes. HTML is good for that, if we ignore how people break that with styling.
I would argue that PDF is nightmarishly bad - truly one of the worst formats ever created on almost all fronts - but it's the best and most featured option for its use case. Depressingly, I find this is true about a lot of things. I don't know what the answer is.
Worse is better.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#13I'm not going to say the PDF format is perfect, but I do like sending out documents knowing that in general they are going to be opened by a reader in a presentation format. I'd rather they not be opened by an editor, where my viewers are immediately invited to start making changes like a word doc. I suppose having them open initially in a non-editable mode would work, Acrobat functions that way.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#14This is a mistake. The hard-to-edit, assembly-language-like nature of PDF is a feature, not a bug.
The FAQ addresses this objection: https://editablepdf.org/faq/
Yet this perception and the fact that it’s difficult does discourage editing. It’s kinda like security by obscurity: it’s not “real” security, but it does work, for the most part.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#15This is a mistake. The hard-to-edit, assembly-language-like nature of PDF is a feature, not a bug.
The FAQ addresses this objection: https://editablepdf.org/faq/
The FAQ doesn't address it completely in my opinion.
> Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your PDFs have not been tampered with.
That's not really the point that it can't be edited, the value to me is that the sender has confidence that it will look the same to the receiver as the sender.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
What's a better format for displaying and printing documents consistently and with selectable text? > It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes That is a feature. I expect my PDFs to display with pixel-perfect consistency everywhere. There are other formats that adapt to screen sizes. HTML is good for that, if we ignore how people break that with styling.
I would argue that PDF is nightmarishly bad - truly one of the worst formats ever created on almost all fronts - but it's the best and most featured option for its use case. Depressingly, I find this is true about a lot of things. I don't know what the answer is.
I’ve met a few people who feel passionately the way you do, and don’t get it.
I worked with archivists on a few projects and never appreciated the dumpster fire that electronic documents presented.
PDF is an amazing thing as you get an expressive format that preserves look, feel and content and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Just the fact that the US Federal courts standardized on PDF for most filings will ensure that it is a viable format for decades or more.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#17This is a mistake. The hard-to-edit, assembly-language-like nature of PDF is a feature, not a bug.
The FAQ addresses this objection: https://editablepdf.org/faq/
The FAQ addressing an objection doesn't mean that the objection is overcome.
If I send you a PDF the point is that I don't want you to edit it. Otherwise I would have sent a docx file. An 'editable PDF' may as well get lumped in to the OpenDocument standard. It is already universally editable and I'm sure it has support for adding application-specific metadata.
Having a PDF editor isn't some violation of sacred principles; but making changes to the standard to make it easy to edit is not improving the situation. I want to send a format that is hard to edit.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#18I would prefer a “kill PDF” initiative :). PDF is a terrible format for almost all purposes it’s used for. It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes, is hard to parse and loses a ton of information from source documents. I don’t think we could have picked a much worse file format for widespread use.
What's a better format for displaying and printing documents consistently and with selectable text? > It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes That is a feature. I expect my PDFs to display with pixel-perfect consistency everywhere. There are other formats that adapt to screen sizes. HTML is good for that, if we ignore how people break that with styling.
“printing documents consistently and with selectable text”
It’s fine for that purpose but it’s terrible for eBooks, manuals, science papers and a lot of other stuff it’s used for. Some HTML with everything in one file would be much better in my opinion. Something like CHM maybe which MS used to use for help files.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#19I'm not going to say the PDF format is perfect, but I do like sending out documents knowing that in general they are going to be opened by a reader in a presentation format. I'd rather they not be opened by an editor, where my viewers are immediately invited to start making changes like a word doc. I suppose having them open initially in a non-editable mode would work, Acrobat functions that way.
It’s phenomenal for so many use cases it’s absurd. I have a huge stash of PDF files—tons of articles that I’ve saved so I can refer to them later. Meanwhile, half the links I have to blog posts are dead, if not more. I know that I’ll be able to read these PDFs 10 years from now, or 20 years from now. Plenty of them are 10 or 20 years old.
PDF is great for:
- Archiving. It’s self-contained and will work 20 years down the line.
- Math. Anything with equations.
- Printing.
I’ve tried various techniques to archive web pages with varying degrees of success. With PDFs I don’t need to think about it.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would argue that PDF is nightmarishly bad - truly one of the worst formats ever created on almost all fronts - but it's the best and most featured option for its use case. Depressingly, I find this is true about a lot of things. I don't know what the answer is.
I’ve met a few people who feel passionately the way you do, and don’t get it. I worked with archivists on a few projects and never appreciated the dumpster fire that electronic documents presented. PDF is an amazing thing as you get an expressive format that preserves look, feel and content and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Just the fact that the US Federal courts standardized on PDF for most filings…
Problem is that PDF does not preserve content in a machine readable format. It’s a one way street. Once converted to PDF you can’t convert to another format without losing a lot of content and formatting.