Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

twitter.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 65 posts

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#21

Post by cpach »

legulere wrote: post #12

Probably it's actually the other way around. PDFs usually fulfill lots of typographic criteria for better legibility like use of justified text and ligatures that are hardly used in HTML or badly supported. The only real problems are with two column text moving around is annoying and you often have to zoom in. However with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore.

”with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore”

I really can’t agree with you there. Despite that, the reading experience suffers a lot IMO.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#22

Post by cpach »

0xmohit wrote: post #19

Quoting https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056 @eugeneglybin Proprietary though it is, DOC[X] is easier to reflow to fit my screen. Also, I guess PDF fans don't use mobile screens enough. Reflow isn't about PDF per se , it is about the underlying reader being used. That said, it is certainly a much better alternative than DOC[X]. Different versions of Microsoft Word tend to produce different output…

Are there really any PDF viewers that does reflow? I’ve never heard of that before.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#23

Post by 0xmohit »

delcaran wrote: post #13
james_morton wrote: post #3

PDF was made for printing, not displaying. As someone who has been in the printing business for a long time, PDF was a god send, no more worrying about missing fonts, no more page margin differences, no more driver discrepancies. What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge .

> What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge. Not really, it depends on the PDF software. I have printed the same bill with SumatraPDF, Acrobat Reader X and Acrobat Reader DC: different fonts, different sizes and missing logos...

If the underlying document doesn't embed the fonts it uses, then the reader would perform substitution. This causes different outputs on different readers.

It's more of a PDF producing application problem that fail to either embed the rather uncommon or proprietary fonts.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#24

Post by [deleted] »

delcaran wrote: post #13
james_morton wrote: post #3

PDF was made for printing, not displaying. As someone who has been in the printing business for a long time, PDF was a god send, no more worrying about missing fonts, no more page margin differences, no more driver discrepancies. What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge .

> What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge. Not really, it depends on the PDF software. I have printed the same bill with SumatraPDF, Acrobat Reader X and Acrobat Reader DC: different fonts, different sizes and missing logos...

[deleted]

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#25

Post by 0xmohit »

cpach wrote: post #22
0xmohit wrote: post #19

Quoting https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056 @eugeneglybin Proprietary though it is, DOC[X] is easier to reflow to fit my screen. Also, I guess PDF fans don't use mobile screens enough. Reflow isn't about PDF per se , it is about the underlying reader being used. That said, it is certainly a much better alternative than DOC[X]. Different versions of Microsoft Word tend to produce different output…

Are there really any PDF viewers that does reflow? I’ve never heard of that before.

The PDF creating application needs to ensure that the document is accessible. Adobe Reader (on desktop) does support reflow [0]. Adobe Reader on Android also supports reflow [1].

[0] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...

[1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-free-PDF-reader-on-Andr...

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#26

Post by Freak_NL »

delcaran wrote: post #13
james_morton wrote: post #3

PDF was made for printing, not displaying. As someone who has been in the printing business for a long time, PDF was a god send, no more worrying about missing fonts, no more page margin differences, no more driver discrepancies. What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge .

> What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge. Not really, it depends on the PDF software. I have printed the same bill with SumatraPDF, Acrobat Reader X and Acrobat Reader DC: different fonts, different sizes and missing logos...

Usually it is the PDF that is at fault, or rather, the assumptions made by the author (or the authoring software). A PDF meant to be portable and usable for a long time should embed all fonts used. If you get different fonts and sizes in different viewers, that tends to hint at a lack of embedded fonts, leaving the PDF viewer to substitute using its fall back fonts.

Most PDFs I come across tend to come with embedded fonts and work just fine on any decent PDF-viewer.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#28

Post by arximboldi »

cpach wrote: post #22
0xmohit wrote: post #19

Quoting https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056 @eugeneglybin Proprietary though it is, DOC[X] is easier to reflow to fit my screen. Also, I guess PDF fans don't use mobile screens enough. Reflow isn't about PDF per se , it is about the underlying reader being used. That said, it is certainly a much better alternative than DOC[X]. Different versions of Microsoft Word tend to produce different output…

Are there really any PDF viewers that does reflow? I’ve never heard of that before.

I use this tool to reflow PDF papers for an e-book reader: http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#29

Post by jwdunne »

cpach wrote: post #18
jwdunne wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're delightful to read on mobile too with a reader that maintains zoom and allows continuous scrolling. I don't mind flipping the page but it's far more friction than flipping the page of an actual book since you do it about 5 to 10 times more.

What mobile PDF readers do you recommend? I’ve been longing for zoom fixation and continuous scrolling but had no idea this existed in current apps.

Foxit PDF Reader does this beautifully. It's far better on iOS but still works better than the alternatives on Android.

Trust me, it is a DREAM to read PDFs on mobile with Foxit. I avoided PDFs for years because iBooks and Kindle suck on mobile. Acrobat failed to even render the text in a PDF I tried so that was a non starter.

Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

#30

Post by Freak_NL »

foota wrote: post #17
ocdtrekkie wrote: post #4

From an additional tweet, we can see that Guido's biggest reason for disliking PDF is the text not being responsive. This is actually my FAVORITE thing about PDFs. They're like pages. They perfectly replicate the book medium they are often taken from. If I want to make something bigger or smaller, I can do that, and it just works with zoom. It's not trying to guess what I'm trying to do and adjust things in ways I do…

I just wish that PDFs were more developer friendly, from what I've seen they're kind of a painful format (not that the modern web page is any easier to read the source of but still)

PDF is a lot easier to handle if you consider it binary output, just like PNG or JPEG. For a lot of developers it makes more sense to use one of the PDF emitting tool chains or libraries available instead of working with the PDF file format directly — the most well-known option being LaTeX of course.
Post reply on HN