121–130 of 162 posts
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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?
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…
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…
Anyone else remember all the times a government released a censored document only to have someone discover that they could just remove the black bar layer and see the original text with hardly any difficulty at all?
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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.
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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.
eBook formats can do that, but they may struggle with math notation - I haven't read any mathematical work on ebooks.
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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.
When you print a word document to PDF the actual text, placement, and fonts are all embedded in the pdf. It may have been designed for publishing, but it's pretty simple to edit text in it.
That's why it's used in marketing for things like lookbooks and elsewhere for things like contracts, that are read-only by design and should never be edited by anyone but the entity that wrote it in the first place.
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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…
Also, presentations. It's pretty calming to know that every slide will look as intended, without anything misplaced or missing.
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…
> 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…
Really the issue is that we need a non-MS-Word editable document format that includes hash/signature features to ensure the edit/publish state of the document.
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…
If reports that come out of systems need to be edited they should dump to excel or word and not pdf.
While the P in PDF means portable I think it’s better thought of as “published” as in “published document file”.