191–200 of 326 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If PDF had an "accident", and someone was able to do to it what Steve Jobs did to Flash, I would be very happy.
Are there any other "fixed" or "docker-like" formats for documents besides PDFs that solves a lot of problems with PDF format? From what I understand, PDF is an xml based document standard.
This is a clickbait, sensationalist headline. “Saving a PDF with Preview in Big Sur can corrupt OCR text added by a third-party program” is more accurate.
In my very humble opinion, it's accurate: "Saving a PDF with Preview in Big Sur [Preview in Big Sur] can corrupt OCR text added by a third-party program [is irreversibly destroying PDFs]" I understand the (fairly common, in these comments) viewpoint that this is the fault of the "third-party program", but since the PDF is readable up until Preview touches it...I find it hard to come around to the viewpoint the third-…
There's a big difference between "read-only operation is mangling files" vs. "PDF writer is buggy".
My guess is that the output PDF is still valid, but that an embedded (subset) font has had its `ToUnicode` map stripped, so that there's no link between the character codes used in the text elements and the "actual" characters they represent (there are also other ways this corruption could happen, but dropping or mangling the `ToUnicode` map seems like a likely cause).
This is almost certainly it. I've seen similar issues with copy/paste from poorly constructed PDFs, often ones generated by "print to PDF" features.
I remember many years ago distributing PDFs as part of course material, that Adobe's official reader would open just fine, but Mac's built-in one wouldn't (and simply fail with a useless "an error occurred" message.) Only a small subset of the class was using Macs and the built-in reader, so it took a while to discover. The problem eventually turned out to be some oddity in the way it treats whitespace[1], that Adobe…
Do you by chance have a "definitely strangest" file formats? Just curious if something out there is vastly weirder, or more perplexing, than PDFs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If PDF had an "accident", and someone was able to do to it what Steve Jobs did to Flash, I would be very happy.
Are there any other "fixed" or "docker-like" formats for documents besides PDFs that solves a lot of problems with PDF format? From what I understand, PDF is an xml based document standard.
Some contracts may need to be upheld between creator and consumer. If the consumer doesn‘t want to, well, that‘s freedom, isn’t it?
Of course it is the most code executing document format to ever execute code, so if that was the issue...
Is postscript (that‘s what PDFs are ultimately right?) capable of thing‘s that HTML+CSS+SVG isn‘t?
Edit: Oh no I completely blanked on the fact that web pages literally don‘t have pages. Seems like a big one.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That not remembering the last page you were at in Books drives me crazy. My iPad would be the perfect device for reading PDF books especially technical and maths text books, if weren't for the Chinese torture of whether it will remember your page the next time you open it or will I have to scroll through until I recall where I left.
I've been a happy GoodReader user for years. Syncs with a variety of sources, remembers where I was, bookmarks work. Annotations work, but I don't use that much beyond being able to say it works.
- It syncs across all my devices. No 3rd party storage like Dropbox required. In fact what I don't like is GoodReader asks for too broad an access to Dropbox/OneDrive if you try to set it up.
- Books is first party app so absolutely no tracking whatsoever. GoodReader had Facebook SDK and Google Analytics and was trying to contact a bunch of other trackers the last time I installed it.
I remember many years ago distributing PDFs as part of course material, that Adobe's official reader would open just fine, but Mac's built-in one wouldn't (and simply fail with a useless "an error occurred" message.) Only a small subset of the class was using Macs and the built-in reader, so it took a while to discover. The problem eventually turned out to be some oddity in the way it treats whitespace[1], that Adobe…
> PDF is one of the strangest file formats I've worked with. Do you by chance have a "definitely strangest" file formats? Just curious if something out there is vastly weirder, or more perplexing, than PDFs?
I remember many years ago distributing PDFs as part of course material, that Adobe's official reader would open just fine, but Mac's built-in one wouldn't (and simply fail with a useless "an error occurred" message.) Only a small subset of the class was using Macs and the built-in reader, so it took a while to discover. The problem eventually turned out to be some oddity in the way it treats whitespace[1], that Adobe…
> PDF is one of the strangest file formats I've worked with. Do you by chance have a "definitely strangest" file formats? Just curious if something out there is vastly weirder, or more perplexing, than PDFs?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Why anyone treats PDF as anything but a write-once format is beyond me. sigh These kind of ignorant statemens really annoy me. The massive part of PDF spec is dedicated to editable features (annotations, form filling and digital signatures) which are used by massive industries daily because it brings them a lot of value. It's REALLY not that hard to think for a second and remember why having a single file which can…
le sigh the surface changes you're talking about are small potatoes compared to removing a page and altering document structure without breaking anything.
Editing actual page contents is hard but the format itself wasn't designed with live editing in mind. Instead, they made a tradeoff to render the document consistently on all devices which has made the format so popular.