You can tell the writers and designers hate the PDF format because they made the damn thing so difficult to read, layout-wise. They went 1990s PageMaker/QuarkXpress crazy here.
History of the PDF
41–50 of 58 posts
Re: History of the PDF
#42So, 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…
Mostly, the page description language (inside PDFs) says "move to point (x, y) and write text foo " or "move to point (x, y) and draw glyph bar ". The reason that many PDFs produce garbage when extracting text is because the underlying document doesn't include fonts, every letter is a drawn glyph. This is most common in older (1990s) pdfs generated on UNIX systems. Since the page description language is saying "write…
DJVU works like that too; -BUT- you can embed the text with some internal operation in both kind of decuments.
On GNULinux/BSD you have OCRmyPDF to do that.
Re: History of the PDF
#43Are 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..
DJVU, but it's raster I think.
Re: History of the PDF
#44PDF is the worst document format, apart from all the other formats. When developing software to read or process PDFs the PDF spec can always deliver a jump scare like no other spec. But to give it credit it broke Microsoft's stranglehold on documents, not completely, but back in the mid 2000s organizations no longer required you to submit things as word documents anymore.
That's the thing. Every PC, Mac, Android, iPhone can display PDF files. You can capture all elements of a website on one. It just works.
> It just works.
As long are you're using the one true program: Adobe Acrobat.
A few years ago I did the mistake of printing a PDF shipping label from a web browser ... which left a critical bar-code blank.
Re: History of the PDF
#45>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.
HTML was; Javascript wasn't.
Re: History of the PDF
#46For everybody complaining about the non-transformative character of PDF: There are several PDF standards out in the wild. In the graphic industry we mainly use PDF/X files. These are very solid and precise in defining the layout and how objects are rendered. For archiving purposes there's another standard, it's called PDF/A. Part of PDF/A is that you must be able to transform its text content back to Unicode. So, if…
I would also add that .pdfs are often not meant to be transformed. They are the digital equivalent of a book, which no one complains about not being able to edit. If you wanted to have a document you could edit you don't use .pdf, but something else before you convert export it as an .pdf. The same is true about images. No one complains about .jpg not being editable, as any sane person would use a photoshop or similar file and only export the final product.
Re: History of the PDF
#47Are 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..
Well, this is exactly why PDF was invented and is doing its job so well. To preserve a desired layout and very specific information on how something has to be outputted. That comes with downsides, yes, but at its core it's just working fine. edit: Third option would be to render your content as an image, but that comes with its own downsides.
expect I don't feel many programs are working in PDF natively except for Adobe products. It's always just an export target, or you "print to PDF"
So to me it kinda looks like the format is lacking
I also don't know much about it, but I assume it's not easy to generate programmatically. While for instance generating an SVG diagram/image is generally pretty trivial
Re: History of the PDF
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
I used to click "Print" (macOS) and save to file in (ironically for this article) PDF... does it work for you?
An issue with this is that the print CSS of most websites is an afterthought. While it’s possible to alter the design with @media print as well as the page breaks, few websites do this. You are often left with broken layouts, empty pages, or nonsense page breaks.
For some insane reason, one of the stores we use that you can order online and pickup at the store, when you try to print the page with the barcode, the barcode does not print. We end up having to take a screenshot and print that. It's just utterly baffling, especially for this specific use case.
Re: History of the PDF
#49For 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.
This is a nit for me in the PDF experience. The browsers I use tend to have no difficulty in rendering the PDF in the browser, but every now and again, you click on a PDF and now it's in your Downloads folder and opening up your OSs PDF viewer. 99% of the time, those PDFs are as disposable as HTML pages that I'd rather not manage and intern on my machine.
Re: History of the PDF
#50Are 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..
Microsoft tried with XPS which is a zipped XML format, pretty much like MS Office 2007+ files. To Adobe's credit, they made PDF an open standard around the time XPS came out. Maybe it's a combination of being there first, many files already in PDF, and finally making the format open which made PDF win.
The LOC's write-up is informative, I think: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0005...
They do say "please don't" as far as their "LC preference"[1] but then later in the document have nice things to say about the format being just .zip and .xml so its introspection and recovery options are much larger than "welp, hope pdf2text still exists in 2040"
1: they have a Recommended Formats Statement: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/ which currently is published in html and pdf with a "Get Adobe Reader" button on the page, which I feel is dangerously misguided advice