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The Editable PDF Initiative

editablepdf.org

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Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#21

Post by pacaro »

jimueller wrote: post #15
smacktoward wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 th…

And then of course there is the deliberately edit hostile way that PDFs can be (ab)used, by printing a document and then scanning it to PDF. In my experience some lawyers like this because it means that to suggest edits you have to retype or OCR entire paragraphs

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#22

Post by microcolonel »

jolmg wrote: post #5
Ididntdothis wrote: post #3

I 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.

The claim that text is selectable in PDFs is often dubious.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#23

Post by microcolonel »

danso wrote: post #9
happytoexplain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but an adaptive format could allow static layout, while a static format inherently can not allow an adaptive layout.

And what is this adaptive format? Is it HTML? The FAQ addresses why this initiative is skeptical of using HTML: https://editablepdf.org/faq/ > Why not use web standards, such as HTML/CSS? > We do use the relevant parts of HTML and CSS, where appropriate. But web standards do not provide for specification of the layout of the document in a robust way, which is guaranteed not to reflow when opened on other systems. Fur…

Indeed, advance needs to be measured in the integer units of the font, if you want stable line breaks.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#24

Post by naniwaduni »

Ididntdothis wrote: post #20
Spooky23 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is true of practically all formats.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#25

Post by kick »

klodolph wrote: post #19
ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #13

I'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…

Why not just archive.org or CTRL-S?

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#26

Post by klodolph »

microcolonel wrote: post #22
jolmg wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

The claim that text is selectable in PDFs is often dubious.

The problem is that text selection relies on the PDF generation to be done in some kind of sensible fashion. There are so many ways to generate PDFs, and in some of them, the actual text is mangled or its order is mangled before it gets to the PDF generation step itself.

But in general, if you generate the PDF with an authoring tool like LaTeX or InDesign, or if you print to PDF from a webpage or document, it's going to be selectable in a sensible way.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#27

Post by abrookewood »

microcolonel wrote: post #22
jolmg wrote: post #5

Earlier 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.

The claim that text is selectable in PDFs is often dubious.

Not sure about other apps, but the paid reader I use (1) includes an OCR function that adds a text layer to the document. Seems to work pretty well. (1) https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#28

Post by ropiwqefjnpoa »

klodolph wrote: post #19
ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #13

I'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…

Yeah, now that nearly everything prints or saves to pdf format, I have little use for a direct editor. Just make sure my PDF's always open and always look the same.

What I would like, is to make PDF's easy to markup with highlighting, circles, comments etc. Currently, even in Acrobat, it's not very intuitive.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#29

Post by BEEdwards »

I think it's funny that the top two comments of this post are diametrically opposed, yet I kind of agree with both of them.

The PDF is a terrible format, yet if I'm sending an email with an attachment I want you to see exactly how it looks on my computer then I'm exporting to PDF.

However if your book is only available as a pdf I'm probably going to skip it.

PDF is good for short things, a contract maybe. The best use case is forms which this doesn't really talk about but seems to address, the web has basically solved it, but there are times you want to send people a form to fill out that you don't want the formatting to be go wacky on, but still need to be editable.

PDF can do this but isn't good at it, this seems to take that not good and make it good.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#30

Post by klodolph »

kick wrote: post #25
klodolph wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why not just archive.org or CTRL-S?

- archive.org - lots of stuff was never archived, or is not available due to /robots.txt

- ctrl-S - not self-contained, compatibility depends on which browser you use (Safari at least gets it right and puts it in a single file, but then other browsers can't open it. Firefox usually saves it correctly and portably, but now you have multiple files, and you can't rename them because they have references to each other, which makes it hard to organize. Then there's all the JavaScript that web pages sometimes have, which can break in the archive.)

If a PDF is available it's easily better than these alternatives. In general I save webpages I really want to refer to later by copy-pasting the text out and manually reformatting as Markdown, or sometimes with wget.

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