This 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/
I'd say https://xkcd.com/927/ to that.
The Editable PDF Initiative
71–80 of 162 posts
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#72I 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.
Also, can we have an open standard for this, please? Not a proprietary format owned by someone. Just because they're not currently charging for it, doesn't mean they can't.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#73Wow this is an awesome idea!
While editing PDFs on Linux for me was always connected with pain I also had no joy using a plain macos for this. While the preview app is able to do some things it cannot do others that matter.
I wanted to copy some text just yesterday - while I could select and copy it I could not insert it as a text again in the same application.
To have to use some extremely overpriced adobe product for sometimes doing tasks like this is overkill and really unnecessary.
To all the people who like PDF because you cannot edit it like you want: This is the "obfuscation argument" because anyone who has the right tool or googles for 10 min. can somehow edit PDF - it is just a real pain to do so most of the time and the result may look like the patched overhead transparencies we saw back in school in the earlier days.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#74Meh. 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...)
So if you didn't care about the recipient editing the document, you'd send what format? Pretty much anyone can view a PDF and see it as intended, not so much with DOC, DOCX, ODT, INDD...
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#75As far I know, LibreOffice ('Draw' if i remember well) allow you to graphically edit PDF (xourjal too, but not as rich as LibreOffice)
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#76As far I know, LibreOffice ('Draw' if i remember well) allow you to graphically edit PDF (xourjal too, but not as rich as LibreOffice)
LibreOffice does let you create editable PDFs. They do this with a very elegant solution, they embed the Open document format within the PDF. This takes very little additional space, because the Open document format is compressed. I think the LibreOffice Solution is quite elegant; Open document format is already a standard, we don't need to create another one. And most important, it works today, right now.
It would be a lot of effort to create a document format with the kind of richness that PDF supports. I am dubious it would be worth it.
I think most people do not need an editable PDF in the first place, so this is a minority problem. If you do want this, for most people there is already a working solution... just store Open document format within PDFs.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#77I 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.
Also, can we have an open standard for this, please? Not a proprietary format owned by someone. Just because they're not currently charging for it, doesn't mean they can't.
As far as I'm aware PDF is an open standard? Happy to be corrected if wrong but the standard (2.0) is now published by ISO, which annoyingly enough means they charge for it which at least Adobe weren't (<2.0).
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#78Earlier 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…
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.
Interesting. I recall saving as MHTML when I was young but it looks like that's not a thing now.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#79I don't want to give recruiters the ability to edit my CV.
Re: The Editable PDF Initiative
#80Earlier 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…
You might want to take a look at the singleFile chrome/firefox extension. It essentially combines all images, scripts, css into one html file that can be opened offline. As a bonus you can edit the html page with the inspector to hide irrelevant parts and it will save it in that state.
How is that different than mhtml, which is already the default file type for ctrl-s on Chrome?