For some reason, this page embeds the PDF as an iframe. The actual PDF is at https://19971168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/199711...
It's so they can add their help / advertising at the bottom right of the screen.
History of the PDF
11–20 of 58 posts
Re: History of the PDF
#12So, reading the article is a bit weird. It's clear there's an anti-PDF bias from the start, with the implicit assumption that everybody hates reading PDF files. Actually, I don't because I get to read a well formatted document. They even say that it should only be used as a format for things to be printed, never as a document for people to read on a computer... and yet this is clearly meant to be read once on a screen and not printed out. It also contains a hypertext link to their company that obviously wouldn't work if printed, and they embed it in an iframe, because they expect people to be reading it online.
But towards the end, you start to see the real objection to PDFs - that it's not always easy to extract text automatically from a document. It mentions a few of the issues - extra spaces, not enough spaces, hidden text that gets extracted because it's off-page, fonts that are designed to obfuscate the internal text, e.g. re-arranging characters or splitting glyphs up in strange ways, etc. It's worth noting that with the exception of the spaces, these techniques are used deliberately to stop people extracting text or the copyrighted fonts from the document.
It's not at all obvious from the document itself, but if you click on the link to the company, all becomes clear. The reason this company is saying that all these things are problems with PDF is because their company is in the business of extracting raw text from PDF. Ignoring all the designers efforts to place things in specific places to make things pleasing for a human to read, etc... They don't want any of that. They just want to extract the raw text so they can data mine it and sell that as a service.
Re: History of the PDF
#13PDF shares a common property with computational complexity and robotics: the magical world of software is no longer free from physics, as if it ever was. Software has reciprocity in creating these illusions and destroying them.
Re: History of the PDF
#14So, reading the article is a bit weird. It's clear there's an anti-PDF bias from the start, with the implicit assumption that everybody hates reading PDF files. Actually, I don't because I get to read a well formatted document. They even say that it should only be used as a format for things to be printed, never as a document for people to read on a computer... and yet this is clearly meant to be read once on a scree…
Actually most pdfs are formatted in a good way and it’s easy to extract text. The stupid stuff is just copy encryption, which is just a stupid feature (because pdf viewers can ignore it)
I have no idea why somebody hates pdfs for extracting data, when stuff like doc,xls (the old format) is clearly way worse. Pdf sometimes has its quirks but the 2.0 version clearly cleans up a lot of the messes
Re: History of the PDF
#15Statisticians beware: It‘s about the Portable Document Format.
Re: History of the PDF
#16So, reading the article is a bit weird. It's clear there's an anti-PDF bias from the start, with the implicit assumption that everybody hates reading PDF files. Actually, I don't because I get to read a well formatted document. They even say that it should only be used as a format for things to be printed, never as a document for people to read on a computer... and yet this is clearly meant to be read once on a scree…
Actually most pdfs are formatted in a good way and it’s easy to extract text. The stupid stuff is just copy encryption, which is just a stupid feature (because pdf viewers can ignore it) I have no idea why somebody hates pdfs for extracting data, when stuff like doc,xls (the old format) is clearly way worse. Pdf sometimes has its quirks but the 2.0 version clearly cleans up a lot of the messes
> I have no idea why somebody hates pdfs for extracting data, when stuff like doc,xls (the old format) is clearly way worse.
Is this sarcasm?
AFAIK, pdf is deliberately designed to not give a F about semantics. There is no way to determine what is part of what in a pdf document. All you got is association by adjacency.
Hasn't it always been that way? Has something changed?
Re: History of the PDF
#17Are there any real alternatives?
I tried to make a conference poster with SVG - using Inkscape - and it was minor disaster that rendered differently in different programs/browsers, with some features entirely broken
but I don't know of a third option..
Re: History of the PDF
#18Fun fact first version for PC was DOS version:
Re: History of the PDF
#19>In 2020, Nielsen made the case again, writing, “After 20 years of watching users perform similar tasks on a variety of sites that use either PDFs or regular web pages, one thing remains certain: PDFs degrade the user experience.” Good luck saving a HTML version of any modern web page and being able to read it in twenty or thirty years time. HTML just wasn't designed for that.
I used to click "Print" (macOS) and save to file in (ironically for this article) PDF... does it work for you?
Re: History of the PDF
#20So, reading the article is a bit weird. It's clear there's an anti-PDF bias from the start, with the implicit assumption that everybody hates reading PDF files. Actually, I don't because I get to read a well formatted document. They even say that it should only be used as a format for things to be printed, never as a document for people to read on a computer... and yet this is clearly meant to be read once on a scree…
Actually most pdfs are formatted in a good way and it’s easy to extract text. The stupid stuff is just copy encryption, which is just a stupid feature (because pdf viewers can ignore it) I have no idea why somebody hates pdfs for extracting data, when stuff like doc,xls (the old format) is clearly way worse. Pdf sometimes has its quirks but the 2.0 version clearly cleans up a lot of the messes
It’s usually easy to extract individual strings from a PDF, normally single lines, but it can be quite hard to understand how those form into longer paragraphs, especially if the page has multiple columns and inline figures.
It’s also easy to create a PDF that it is hard to extract text from, not through an deliberate attempt to enforce copy protection but often simply from attempts to compress the size of the file as you may not want to store the entirety of a font in a document.
I’ve been on both ends of this, generating documents and consuming them, and I think we probably created something that allowed for much easier text extraction, but it’s far too late now.