It is a pity that DjVu[0] wasn't even mentioned; an open format that was superior to PDF in many ways[1], including better optimization, efficient storage.
The story of the PDF (2018)
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Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#12I'm thankful PDF won, because otherwise I think it would have been Microsoft Word. There was a time when papers, books, resumes, contracts, etc. almost always came as Word. Does anyone else remember getting a book as preface.doc, chap1.doc, chap1a.doc, chap2.doc, subchap2a2.doc, and so on, and a mess of jpegs and gifs and trying to figure out how it had to be assembled, and discovering something was missing, or that…
"but there must be tremendous internal complexity in the PDF format for tiny changes to alter the whole structure."
Imagine a simple file format that doesn't support text wrapping, but allows you to specify elements as (x, y, s) where (x, y) specify a position, and s is a string that will be written left-to-right, truncated at the edge of the screen.
That's a simple file format, right?
But inserting a word somewhere early in that document would change the string within every element in the rest of the paragraph. And maybe move the y position of every element later in the document.
That would be a PITA to diff. Even more so if the document has more than one column.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#13It is a pity that DjVu[0] wasn't even mentioned; an open format that was superior to PDF in many ways[1], including better optimization, efficient storage. [0] http://djvu.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
It's crazy that Yann LeCun was involved in the creation.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#14Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#15Original article, without so many obnoxious ads: https://tedium.co/2018/02/27/pdf-file-format-history/
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#16Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#17Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#18I'm thankful PDF won, because otherwise I think it would have been Microsoft Word. There was a time when papers, books, resumes, contracts, etc. almost always came as Word. Does anyone else remember getting a book as preface.doc, chap1.doc, chap1a.doc, chap2.doc, subchap2a2.doc, and so on, and a mess of jpegs and gifs and trying to figure out how it had to be assembled, and discovering something was missing, or that…
>I'm thankful PDF won, because otherwise I think it would have been Microsoft Word.
Well, probably Microsoft XPS, which was actually a fairly well designed format. But Microsoft didn't have the fight in them to really push it as a competitor to PDF. In part, I suspect b/c it's hard to justify investing a lot of money in your competing document standard as there is not much revenue you can derive from it. As of 2018, Microsoft no longer bundles XPS support in Windows 10.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#19There was a period of time when I thought PDF’s days were numbered. That was over a decade ago. There is now first class support in many applications. I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
It's pretty much essential to the publishing industry. Until we actually stop printing books, we'll be using pdfs.
There's nothing special about PDF. Only reason PDF is useful is because it's easy to convert to/from Postscript and Adobe was pushing out a free viewer for PDFs but not Postscript files. That, and the difference in fees they chose to charge on the formats.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#20Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF It became open source in 2008 so it’s definitely here to stay.
It is a format that doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it an image? Text? Vector graphics? Electronic forms? How about all of the above.
> all of the above
You forgot malware
https://www.thesecurityblogger.com/distributing-malware-insi...