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The Editable PDF Initiative

editablepdf.org

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Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#41

Post by dragonwriter »

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…

> 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.

Different PDF reader software, and even sometimes the same reader software installed in different environments, can render PDFs, especially those containing any text differently.

If you want confidence that it will appear the same, pure image formats are a safer bet.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#42

Post by chungy »

kccqzy wrote: post #36

Meh. Not being easily editable is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes you want to send out a finalized document and want to make 99% of the users unable to edit them. That's what PDFs are for. Imagine lawyers needing to send out a finalized contract. Or a graphic designer sending out the finalized design. Or an electronic book that has gone through the work of the author, the editor, and the publisher and needs no more c…

Agreed, 100%.

Literally the only reason I make and send out PDFs is because they're effectively read-only. (It's not really perfectly so, but nobody should claim it's a tamper-proof document...)

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#43

Post by 9nGQluzmnq3M »

I'm going to add an unsolicited plug for PDFEscape, which effectively lets you "edit" any PDF: https://www.pdfescape.com/

It's an online service that lets you upload PDFs, then edit fields, add text, upload and paste images like your signature, etc. Perfect for filling out tedious paper application forms without having to deal with printing & scanning.

I have no connection other than as a satisfied user, and in fact I have no idea how they make money, since the free mode features suffice for every use case I've had.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#44

Post by klint »

kccqzy wrote: post #36

Meh. Not being easily editable is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes you want to send out a finalized document and want to make 99% of the users unable to edit them. That's what PDFs are for. Imagine lawyers needing to send out a finalized contract. Or a graphic designer sending out the finalized design. Or an electronic book that has gone through the work of the author, the editor, and the publisher and needs no more c…

That objection, and others, are addressed in the project FAQ[1]. It's already possible to open and edit a PDF in various applications.

[1] https://editablepdf.org/faq/

>But isn’t the whole point of PDF that you can’t edit it? No. The fact that standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident than a feature, as PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form documents needed to be transmitted. 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. More extensive edits, however, are more difficult, as they require the document’s logical structure to be automatically detected, and this is an error-prone task.

[...]

>Are you sure we need such a editable PDF format? I believe one of the most important benefits of PDF is its concrete, solid state. The idea of Editable PDF stems from a real-world need to improve the efficiency in the way that we work with documents. Today, the only editable file formats are those native to the applications that generated documents, and none of these formats guarantees the layout to be preserved in the same way as PDF. Furthermore, despite improvements in compatibility, using a native file format still often requires the recipient to be using the same software (and often the same version) of the application, which may not be available.

PDF’s largest asset, its rock-solid visual presentation, will remain, and editable PDFs will be backwardly compatible with the current installed base of PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader and Preview.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#45

Post by hnick »

kccqzy wrote: post #36

Meh. Not being easily editable is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes you want to send out a finalized document and want to make 99% of the users unable to edit them. That's what PDFs are for. Imagine lawyers needing to send out a finalized contract. Or a graphic designer sending out the finalized design. Or an electronic book that has gone through the work of the author, the editor, and the publisher and needs no more c…

Absolutely agreed. My day job is in the print industry so I deal with a lot of PDFs and they are perfect for print production for this reason.

Their main complaint seems to be structural metadata (this text is a heading, this text is the same font as that text on another page, so if you can change one the other should change, etc). I don't think at that point it's worth keeping PDF in the name, it'll confuse people. I certainly don't want to receive files built like that since printers tend to have memory issues with bloated files.

You can already do minor edits anyway with some knowledge (the spec is pretty easy to read) and some programming or a hex editor. The only issue I have is fonts, they are very complicated.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#46

Post by mung »

If you find PDF painful because you can't reflow text or edit it, newsflash: you are using the wrong format. Industries that use PDF extensively: legal and printing. Neither of them want to be able to change documents.

To preempt: I work within printing, yes there are tools to hack into PDFs and make certain alterations or fixes, but it's to get you out of a bind only, it's not a normal healthy workflow.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#47

Post by [deleted] »

klodolph wrote: post #30
kick wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, w…

[deleted]

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#48

Post by bscphil »

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.

If what you want is "PDF the way it should be", we already have that, it's PDF/A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#49

Post by fortran77 »

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.

I use PDFs all day long. It's great. I know people will see documents the same as I do.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#50

Post by mcswell »

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.

We've printed several grammars of languages south Asia from PDFs, and we've also used the PDFs in the absence of the printed grammars. Some of these languages use the Arabic script, generally the nasta'liq version. The Arabic language usually uses the naskh version of the Arabic script, and it can be represented reasonably well with any of a variety of fonts. But nasta'liq is a different beast, and until very recently typesetting it was virtually impossible. (Urdu newspapers were hand written by calligraphers, and reproduced using photo-offset, well past the milenium.) There are now reasonably good nasta'liq fonts (SIL offers a good one), which we used to produce our PDFs (and then embedded the font in the PDF for portability). You still won't get good nasta'liq in HTML unless you happen to have the right rendering engine + the right font.

In short, I don't think we could have typeset these grammars without PDF.

We also did a grammar of Dhivehi, which is the only language in the world that uses the Thaana script. Thaana can be typeset quite easily--if you happen to have the right font. Most people don't. I guess the same thing holds if you happen to be publishing grammars of languages that used cuneiform--not many computer systems have cuneiform fonts!

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