The Editable PDF Initiative

Post by kick » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 2:51 AM UTC

Spooky23 wrote: post #16

happytoexplain wrote: post #8

Earlier 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…

Post by applecrazy » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 2:52 AM UTC

Ididntdothis wrote: post #18

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.

“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.

Post by klodolph » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 2:56 AM UTC

xvilka wrote: post #10

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.

Well, the idea behind PDF is good, just revamping the format will help a lot - remove the unnecessary features, ambiguities, remove old and legacy features, etc.

Post by kccqzy » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:07 AM UTC

pacaro wrote: post #21

jimueller wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Post by Ididntdothis » Thu, Nov 21, 2019, 3:11 AM UTC

naniwaduni wrote: post #24

Ididntdothis wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.