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Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

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Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#141

Post by gruturo »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #114
amelius wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF is an executable file. Many people are worried about running Javascript but still use PDF files without problems.

For better or worse, the years I spent working on Preview for Apple (and PDFKit) I felt bad that our (Apple's) PDF implementation was far short of Adobe's. Radars would show up with PDFs attached, "Preview Does Not Display 3D Image in PDF Like Acrobat" or similar. And I would feel so ... inadequate. PDFKit could render and capture basic annotations ... and that was about it. We could show you forms, allow editing, bu…

Thank you, thank you, THANK YOU for not having put all that cruft in, and by Apple's sheer size, effectively discouraging many from producing and circulating those abominations.

Adobe has an awful track record of security (how many exploits in the past 25 years were in Acrobat (not the PDF spec, the actual Acrobat software) and in Flash?) but PDF is an amazing gift to the world, and, thanks to people like you, effectively safer than how Adobe designed it :))

Unfortunately I have the full Acrobat on my work computer, mandated by my employer, sigh, but that's another story.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#142

Post by amluto »

peterldowns wrote: post #137
JKCalhoun wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, the years I spent working on Preview for Apple (and PDFKit) I felt bad that our (Apple's) PDF implementation was far short of Adobe's. Radars would show up with PDFs attached, "Preview Does Not Display 3D Image in PDF Like Acrobat" or similar. And I would feel so ... inadequate. PDFKit could render and capture basic annotations ... and that was about it. We could show you forms, allow editing, bu…

If it makes you feel any better, Preview is by far the best PDF viewer and editor (I use it for signatures and adding text) I've ever used. I like that the PDF previews in Finder are instant and accurate. I like that it shows as much PDF and as little UI/menubar as possible. I like that it never asks me to upgrade or log in. The search tools work well. I can stitch PDFs together (if I google how to, always forget) an…

And somehow Acrobat (current paid version from Creative Cloud) is the worst PDF form filing option.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#143

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

peterldowns wrote: post #137
JKCalhoun wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, the years I spent working on Preview for Apple (and PDFKit) I felt bad that our (Apple's) PDF implementation was far short of Adobe's. Radars would show up with PDFs attached, "Preview Does Not Display 3D Image in PDF Like Acrobat" or similar. And I would feel so ... inadequate. PDFKit could render and capture basic annotations ... and that was about it. We could show you forms, allow editing, bu…

If it makes you feel any better, Preview is by far the best PDF viewer and editor (I use it for signatures and adding text) I've ever used. I like that the PDF previews in Finder are instant and accurate. I like that it shows as much PDF and as little UI/menubar as possible. I like that it never asks me to upgrade or log in. The search tools work well. I can stitch PDFs together (if I google how to, always forget) an…

> If it makes you feel any better, Preview is by far the best PDF viewer and editor

Seconded. At least most pleasant to use for most things, and never balked at anything I needed to see, fortunately.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#144

Post by layer8 »

SpaghettiCthulu wrote: post #138
eirikbakke wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I ordered an official PDF copy of my college diploma, the order form had an option to enable "tracking" in the PDF file. Sure enough, when the recipient opened the PDF file (and when I tried it myself on a different machine), I got a notification from the company that generated the PDF...

That's horrific! I had no idea that was even a feature of PDFs!

PDFs are roughly on par with web pages feature-wise, including JavaScript or other actions that execute on load. Adobe did this, of course, to stave off the competition from the early web. Nowadays, PDF readers disable most of that by default (if they even support it).

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#145

Post by B1FF_PSUVM »

alberto_ol wrote: post #119
theletterf wrote: post #73

This post reminds me of Umberto Eco's intellectual divertissements. More specifically, this fantastic piece, "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1." https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/881694/cb6119367b...

Umberto Eco quoted Jorge Luis Borges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

Speaking of Borges, sometimes I'm sadly reminded of his spoof of categorization schemes ("Animals: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones," etc. ) : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celestial_Emporium_of_Benevole...

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#146

Post by layer8 »

da_chicken wrote: post #118
JKCalhoun wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF is supposed to a be a printer format, not a word processing document format. While I too would love to nail down a PDF subset to be a standard (for example requiring the accessibility tags that make text extraction easy) perhaps trying to create a hybrid format, one that satisfies both printers and resizable windows, is already an impossible goal. (I've always had to keep my love of PDF a secret from fellow nerds…

I really appreciate what PDF can accomplish, but I also really dislike that it turns into a black box. There really ought to be something that can describe a document structure and also describe document layout in a durable and portable manner. In the range of XML/JSON HTML+CSS PDF PS RAW, it really does feel like there's something missing between HTML and PDF. And it can't be LaTeX, because the document shouldn't be…

PDF includes optional document structure information. Most PDF creation software chooses to not generate it, though.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#149

Post by shp0ngle »

Elzair wrote: post #134
shp0ngle wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

about pdf/a... until recently there was not even an easy way to figure out if pdf is really pdf/a; now there is (verapdf) and it's crazy complex piece of software and maybe I'm wrong but the only way to convert arbitrary pdf to pdf/a with open source software is to convert it to postscript and back with ghostscript - which is affero licensed... with all the possible problems it entails. (there is old version that is…

You could use the pdfium library as an alternative to Ghostscript.

I don't think there is a way to do that with pdfium. I have tried to look at it and failed. Maybe I didn't look hard enough.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#150

Post by JKCalhoun »

peterldowns wrote: post #137
JKCalhoun wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For better or worse, the years I spent working on Preview for Apple (and PDFKit) I felt bad that our (Apple's) PDF implementation was far short of Adobe's. Radars would show up with PDFs attached, "Preview Does Not Display 3D Image in PDF Like Acrobat" or similar. And I would feel so ... inadequate. PDFKit could render and capture basic annotations ... and that was about it. We could show you forms, allow editing, bu…

If it makes you feel any better, Preview is by far the best PDF viewer and editor (I use it for signatures and adding text) I've ever used. I like that the PDF previews in Finder are instant and accurate. I like that it shows as much PDF and as little UI/menubar as possible. I like that it never asks me to upgrade or log in. The search tools work well. I can stitch PDFs together (if I google how to, always forget) an…

I thought Acrobat had ugly UI — stacks and stacks of toolbars for example (this, BTW, about a decade ago — I haven't launched Reader in some time so can't speak to the current UI).

I met one of the engineers from Adobe and said as much — as politely as I could. He said, yeah, we're modeling our UI on Office.

I saw in an instant that they wanted to be seen as a peer, a co-tool, to the Microsoft suite and it all made sense to me.

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