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The Editable PDF Initiative

editablepdf.org

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Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#151

Post by efls »

klodolph wrote: post #19
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.

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…

I tend to save a lot of online articles I want to read as PDFs, but found that on many "modern" sites printing as PDF only saves the first page. What's your work process? Do you run into similar problems?

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#152

Post by MaxBarraclough »

alpaca128 wrote: post #93
vbezhenar wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is sounds like security through obscurity.

This isn't about security, it's about making sure that a text document is formatted exactly the same on all devices, whether it's a PC, a phone or a printer. 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…

> This isn't about security

kccqzy's comment was clearly referring to security.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#153

Post by MaxBarraclough »

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…

> 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.

That is not what PDFs are for. PDF is, well, a Portable Document Format. It is not convenient to modify a PDF, but PDF is not securely resistant to modification (discounting its cryptographic features [0]). Its resistance to modification is a side-effect of its design, not a primary goal.

An attacker will be able to modify your PDF. This gets easier every year, as we'd expect. That doesn't matter, though, as an attacker can always recreate the document, with whichever changes they wish. (Again, neither of these attacks will work if you use cryptographic signing.)

If you want secure assurance of authenticity, you use cryptographic signing. No excuses. If you're a lawyer, I'd hope you aren't placing any stock at all in the inconvenience of modifying a PDF.

[0] https://acrobat.adobe.com/uk/en/sign/capabilities/digital-si...

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#154

Post by brokenmachine »

blunte wrote: post #131
pdpi wrote: post #113

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…

Consistency can be solved with hashing and cryptographic signatures. The user story here is that PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users or users without sufficient technical skill. And since you reference mp3 and jpg, you surely know that both formats can be modified in ways that many people will not recognize as modifications. It just pushes the skill level up a bi…

>PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users

Why is that a problem? I'm pretty sure there's a PDF reader app for every major platform.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#155

Post by Mikhail_Edoshin »

tonyedgecombe wrote: post #84
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.

Yep, XPS is a very clean format. And it seems to be easy to add support for it because of this simplicity. E.g. I normally use Sumatra PDF viewer on PC and MuPDF on Android and they both view XPS just fine.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#158

Post by blunte »

brokenmachine wrote: post #154
blunte wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Consistency can be solved with hashing and cryptographic signatures. The user story here is that PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users or users without sufficient technical skill. And since you reference mp3 and jpg, you surely know that both formats can be modified in ways that many people will not recognize as modifications. It just pushes the skill level up a bi…

>PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users Why is that a problem? I'm pretty sure there's a PDF reader app for every major platform.

Not all readers allow annotations or changes, so forms cannot be filled out on the computer. Instead they have to be printed, hand filled in, then scanned again.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#159

Post by blunte »

kccqzy wrote: post #145
blunte wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

By your argument, PDF fails. I can provide examples of PDFs that look different on different devices.

PDF gives you all the tools to make sure that doesn't happen. No one prevents you from shooting yourself in the foot by writing a bad PDF that doesn't adhere to common good practices. For example it is technically possible to make a PDF with text without embedding fonts. Doing that is a bad idea. By your argument, any programming language, no much how safe it purports to be, fails because they allow you to write bugs…

This was about the claim that PDFs provide consistent/identical document representation on every device.

Few programming languages claim to provide bug free programs, so your example is irrelevant.

Re: The Editable PDF Initiative

#160

Post by nxpnsv »

kccqzy wrote: post #146
nxpnsv wrote: post #107

I prefer my PDF static, my meticulously edited LaTeX would be ruined by sticky fingers. However, something I much would like is better copy to clipboard from PDF. Non trivial input with tables and line breaks turns in to indecipherable alphabet soup...

Check out https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accsupp which may be helpful. I've only used it a handful of times on small amounts of text though.

Cool, I’ll try it out. although typically I only need to copy other researchers work.
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