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The story of the PDF (2018)

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Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#41

Post by ksec »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #18
alister wrote: post #6

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,…

XPS happened during the Microsoft era, which means no one really wants another format dictated by them. So there was very little incentives, interest and adoption.

XPS ultimately became an Open Standard as Open XML Paper Specification. But the fear and burn during IE era were far too great.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#43

Post by mongol »

gnicholas wrote: post #40
gumby wrote: post #33

PDF has been bad news, as it embodies assumptions from an earlier age: how paper works. I want to read flowable text that adapts to my screen and my size needs. I want to be able to reliably select and extract text. I don’t need something that apes an archaic IO system (printer+paper) with all its flaws and, when on scree, none of its advantages.

Agreed. Adobe's recently-announced [1] Liquid Mode for mobile devices is a step in the right direction. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/adobes-liquid-mode-uses-ai...

Seems to be a feature of their reader rather than an improvement of the format. I am unsure if that is actually in the right direction

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#44

Post by pjmlp »

gumby wrote: post #33

PDF has been bad news, as it embodies assumptions from an earlier age: how paper works. I want to read flowable text that adapts to my screen and my size needs. I want to be able to reliably select and extract text. I don’t need something that apes an archaic IO system (printer+paper) with all its flaws and, when on scree, none of its advantages.

I still use lots of paper and PDF is the ideal format for it.

There are other formats for flowable text in screens.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#45

Post by pjmlp »

alister wrote: post #6

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…

The irony is when I get told that people want an application to output PDF instead of Word, because it is read only.

I always get amused by proving those people how to edit PDFs.

It is the same logic that documents sent by Fax are legally binding but the same document sent by email not.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#46

Post by gnicholas »

mongol wrote: post #43
gnicholas wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Adobe's recently-announced [1] Liquid Mode for mobile devices is a step in the right direction. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/adobes-liquid-mode-uses-ai...

Seems to be a feature of their reader rather than an improvement of the format. I am unsure if that is actually in the right direction

That is my understanding also. It would certainly be better if it were part of the format, but I imagine they're very concerned with backward compatibility. So perhaps this is the best we can hope for from Adobe.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#47

Post by adrian_b »

msla wrote: post #21
hyiltiz wrote: post #11

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

DjVu is a great format for scanned images, which is its primary use-case, but I'm not seeing where you can have actual, selectable text in a DjVu document, like you can with PDF and PostScript. It seems like it's all images.

I have not read the specification, but the DJVu format must have a way to store the plain text besides the images and that way is frequently used.

I do not remember ever reading a DJVu file that did not allow searching and selecting the text, while PDF files which do not allow those, because they store only the scanned images, are quite frequent.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#48

Post by jwilk »

msla wrote: post #21
hyiltiz wrote: post #11

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

DjVu is a great format for scanned images, which is its primary use-case, but I'm not seeing where you can have actual, selectable text in a DjVu document, like you can with PDF and PostScript. It seems like it's all images.

> 3.3.2 Hidden text

> Every DjVu image optionally includes a hidden text layer that associated graphical features with the corresponding text. The hidden text layer is usually generated by running Optical Character Recognition software. This textual information provides for indexing DjVu documents and copying/pasting text from DjVu page images.

I copied that text from the DjVu spec, which is in the DjVu format.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#49

Post by webreac »

ternaryoperator wrote: post #18
alister wrote: post #6

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,…

They had also RTF which was one of the best formats created by Microsoft.
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