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The Editable PDF Initiative

editablepdf.org

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Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#81

Post by tonyedgecombe »

Angostura wrote: post #68
klint wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. I disagree with this - I was an IT journalist when PDFs came out and all the blurb at the time was centred around the advantage of being able to create a document and know that it could be displayed by anyone, irrespective of machine, OS e…

PDF was based on PostScript, a system that was created for digital printers. The big selling point of PostScript was that your output would look the same whether you were printing on an Apple LaserWriter or a Linotype.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#82

Post by vbezhenar »

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…

This is sounds like security through obscurity.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#83

Post by adrianN »

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #28
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…

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.

On the mac I found Skim to be pretty good for annotating PDFs

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#84

Post by tonyedgecombe »

piadodjanho wrote: post #57

The PDF file format is anachronous. When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user. Also, the file was made with the assumption it was suppose to be printed, not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the data. A f…

Microsoft's XPS format solved many of the issues with PDF. Unfortunately it was too late and came from the wrong people so didn't succeed.

As it's a zip file it also needs to be read from the end although it can be linearised as well.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#85

Post by Asooka »

LordDragonfang wrote: post #80
lawry wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

MHtml doesn't execute javascript, see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=452901 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=330663

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#86

Post by tonyedgecombe »

klodolph wrote: post #35
xvilka wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I'm not sure that is so necessary. PDF is kind of a cleaned-up version of PostScript to begin with. Which features or ambiguities would you remove?

If you were starting from scratch it would look quite different, the obvious change would be Unicode only. In fact it would probably look much like XPS.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#87

Post by taneq »

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.

Exactly. Even if it's now fairly easy to edit a PDF (although the obvious approaches like opening them in Word still often visibly mess with the formatting), sending something as a PDF is a signal to the recipient that it's not meant to be changed.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#88

Post by rusk »

ropiwqefjnpoa wrote: post #28
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…

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.

I find "Preview", standard PDF viewer for the Mac to be pretty good for annotations. I "think" it might be available under acrobat for windows but it's a bit more obscure.

Certainly, between me a mac user, and colleague using Linux I was able to provide feedback on their documentation in this way ...

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#89

Post by contravariant »

enriquto wrote: post #64
Terretta wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Something that reflows when you change text size, font family, or page orientation.

I am not sure that we can call a text that has not yet been typeset a "book". In any case, do you know any such format that does not completely botch equations? The closest I can imagine is html with mathjax.

If you want a standalone HTML solution I reckon you could embed the formula as SVG. Or maybe you can somehow get MathML to look nice, but so far that seems tricky without using JavaScript to help (which might not be supported/desirable in a document format) and I'm not sure about the state of MathML support in e-readers.

One of the problems with including mathematical formulae in a reflowable document format is that the concept of reflowable mathematical notation simply doesn't seem to exist, so In practice you'll end up with something equivalent to a picture.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#90

Post by rusk »

piadodjanho wrote: post #57

The PDF file format is anachronous. When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user. Also, the file was made with the assumption it was suppose to be printed, not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the data. A f…

> computers only had a few KBs of RAM.

I don't think this is right. Postscript maybe ... but PDF in my experience came about in the 90s, when computers typically had between 4 and 16MB of RAM ...

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