91–100 of 162 posts
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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).
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.
The PDF file is reliable in that aspect while other widely used document formats like .doc and .docx are basically a gamble, even if you open the document on the same machine with the same software. The same with presentations: You just need to open the file in a slightly different software or version or encounter one of the countless bugs and suddenly you have a picture overlapping with text.
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…
> 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. That's a good decision. Make the file format versatile and powerful. Don't constrain it by the limitations of contemporary hardware. > Also, the file was made with the assumption it was supposed t…
I think you are severly underselling how difficult it is to do these things.
1. You need to be a specialist in how the PDF format works.
2. From experience, it's not trivial to have logic that correctly handles all possible formatting cases in a PDF. 2.
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…
Perhaps it's that way because it's read-only? If PDF files had to be generated in such a way that they can later be edited, things would get a lot more complex and probably less reliable.
Also it feels like it's the wrong way to go about it, because no matter what PDF editing will never be as powerful as a proper text editor. So it would be the wrong tool to collaborate on a document (because as soon as you want to do something more advanced with layout, images, etc. you probably can't). Maybe it's good if you want to quickly amend a contract before sending it, but then you need to remember that your .doc is no longer the latest version.
Basically a PDF document shouldn't be the source of truth for document editing as that would lock you to the wrong format.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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.
This quote was supposed to be an absurd hypothetical. But I guess we'll live to see it in reality.