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The Editable PDF Initiative

editablepdf.org

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Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#111

Post by pdpi »

pge wrote: post #106
laurent123456 wrote: post #96

> PDF has long become the de facto format for exchanging print-oriented documents on the Web, and for a good reason: it works, and reliably so! 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…

While this is mostly true, it should not be relied on. If the PDF is produced from a text document or report generator, then the text as well as the charts are easy to edit with any text editor (only requires decompressing the PDF first). Obviously different if the document is a scanned image, but just saving a Word doc into PDF does not make it a read-only file. The benefit of PDF is that it is (as the name suggests…

It's read-only in the same sense as a jpeg or an mp3 are read-only — it's a format designed for publishing, rather than editing, data.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#112

Post by Spooky23 »

jolmg wrote: post #54
e1ven wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's exactly what I like about it. My ideal PDF is essentially a PNG file with selectable/searchable text. It's a great WORM format. Every added feature makes it worse.

Why is it desireable for it to not be machine readable? What could possibly be the advantage in that?

It is machine readable, just not readily machine malleable.

I worked on a project where we were digitizing and cataloging various records. It was less challenging to do this with papers from the British colonial administration from the late 1700s, than to decipher certain 1980s documents written with a defunct word processor. PDF is a compromise that helps address that issue.

I would not recommend maintaining your general ledger in a PDF. But an annual report that may be referenced for decades is a great example of why a PDF is a useful format.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#113

Post by pdpi »

PDF is a publishing, rather than an editing format. It belongs in the same bucket as .mp3 and .jpg, rather than the .doc and .psd bucket.

This is not about how easy or how hard it is to modify a pdf, it's about the intended purpose. The fact that it's meant for publishing means we get to optimise it as such, both in terms of simplicity of the format itself, and in terms of the tools that interact with it. This makes consistent-ish rendering much easier. The features that would enable the format to be "editable" are also the sort of features that make consistency hard.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#114

Post by lxgr »

tom_mellior wrote: post #104
runxel wrote: post #102

Is this some weird kind of satire I don't understand? Being read-only is the thing why we have PDF in the first place. If you want to do changes, go back to the program where it came from. It's simple as that! :)

I've often needed to fill in PDF forms that were not using PDF's fillable form fields, or to paste in a scanned signature. This is an important use case for PDFs, and the people who send you these forms expect you to have a printer, nice handwriting, and a scanner. Instead you can do the whole thing in software, with only standard Ubuntu packages, but it can be painful for multi-page documents: I typically have to us…

PDFs specifically support the form use case (I remember using this a few times for things like applying for credit cards etc). That was on Ubuntu too!

Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and even fits the PDF model quite well.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#115

Post by klodolph »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #86
klodolph wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Isn’t the main problem with XPS just software support, though?

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#116

Post by tom_mellior »

lxgr wrote: post #114
tom_mellior wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've often needed to fill in PDF forms that were not using PDF's fillable form fields, or to paste in a scanned signature. This is an important use case for PDFs, and the people who send you these forms expect you to have a printer, nice handwriting, and a scanner. Instead you can do the whole thing in software, with only standard Ubuntu packages, but it can be painful for multi-page documents: I typically have to us…

PDFs specifically support the form use case (I remember using this a few times for things like applying for credit cards etc). That was on Ubuntu too! Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and even fits the PDF model quite well.

> PDFs specifically support the form use case

Yes, but the person creating the PDF must know this, and must know how to do it with the software they have. In practice, many forms I've seen came out of situations where this was not the case.

> Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and even fits the PDF model quite well.

It's not a problem to open a one-page PDF in Inkscape or the Gimp and paste a signature in there. That's what I said. It gets tedious with multi-page PDFs. Do you have a better solution for this?

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#118

Post by lxgr »

The proposed way to achieve editability sounds like it is inherently at odds with the page description model of PDF, which is in turn exactly what gives it its stable output on different platforms.

A PDF renderer basically needs to be able to rasterize fonts and paint glyphs on a page/screen – that's it. Layout, spacing and even kerning are left to the producing application.

The project mentions the lack of robustness inherent to web-based document formats, but I'm afraid that any alternative would either be severely limited in the range of achievable output documents or would end up reinventing the wheel.

As an analogy: SVG has been around for a while, and yet we still use PNGs and I don't see them going away anytime soon.

Maybe what we really need is just more widespread support of ePub, and maybe some extensions for more "document-like" (instead of book-like) functionality in editors for it, and potentially support for an embedded rendered PDF for layout stability?

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#119

Post by howard941 »

tom_mellior wrote: post #104
runxel wrote: post #102

Is this some weird kind of satire I don't understand? Being read-only is the thing why we have PDF in the first place. If you want to do changes, go back to the program where it came from. It's simple as that! :)

I've often needed to fill in PDF forms that were not using PDF's fillable form fields, or to paste in a scanned signature. This is an important use case for PDFs, and the people who send you these forms expect you to have a printer, nice handwriting, and a scanner. Instead you can do the whole thing in software, with only standard Ubuntu packages, but it can be painful for multi-page documents: I typically have to us…

This is one area where Acrobat (The Full Version) shines. It has a typewriter mode allowing adding arbitrary text set in arbritary fonts to a preexisting .pdf as easily for a single page pdf as for a 100 page pdf.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#120

Post by lxgr »

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.

> for almost all purposes it’s used for

So we should kill a format because it is used for something it was never intended for?

How is the lack of a widely compatible, self-contained markup-plus-resources format PDFs fault?

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