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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. [0] http://djvu.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
I'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…
Convert to text with: pdftotext -layout
I'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…
Other than compression and such encodings, PDF files are actually text files, with a drawing model largely based on PostScript but without the programming. If you want to diff them, use `mutool clean -d -a` to first turn them into pure ASCII text.
That said, since it's a "baked" layout format, if one word pushes the rest of the text forward, everything after that will show up with changed coordinates. It's closer to a vector image format like SVG than a markup format like HTML or ODF.
There are also things like font subsetting, where removing a word that was the only use of a character, or adding a word that uses a new character, might change the font data to add/remove those characters.
They are amazing at exactly reproducing a printed document, and far superior to a jpg at doing that because it is vector, searchable, can contain links, etc
If you've ever tried to read a math textbook in ebook format on a ipad then switched to pdf, you can see how pdf shines.
So much pain and time will be spend on machine learning models extracting semantic meaning from pdfs that could have been saved if archivers were to also save source formats or machine readable data. But for some reason, publishers have an allergy to submitting those so its a lost cause.
At the conference for Macintosh network administrators, we were all super excited about this World Wide Web thing. The potential for a while new paradigm for information publishing, from creation to distribution, for in-house corporate operations or mass media companies, it was a new medium that would make paper obsolete.
The Adobe reps were visibly exasperated by all this. They had solved this problem, years ago. You could click on any element of a PDF, and go to a different place in the current document, or open any other file on your computer. Powerful tools for graphical interactive PDF creation and editing. Even the ability to trigger AppleScript actions in response to mouse or keyboard events...
The Web, by comparison, was primitive and naive. Why was it getting all the attention?
I'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,…
I'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…