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The story of the PDF (2018)

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Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#51

Post by vram22 »

webreac wrote: post #49
ternaryoperator wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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.

I don't have an opinion on how good a format RTF is, but I kind of like it.

As part of a Java project (a while ago), I studied the RTF format, partly by reading the spec, and partly through reverse engineering - by creating multiple incrementally larger RTF docs, starting from zero content, then adding a word, then a font style, then a paragraph, a table, etc. And after each addition, opened the RTF in a hex editor and viewed the content, to help decipher the format rules. Then wrote a small RTF generation library in Java, that we used in the project to programmatically generate reports from DB data fetched via EJB. I also provided some ability to vary content and style independently. Good fun.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#52

Post by rstuart4133 »

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 don't know of a better alternative to PDF that was around at the time, but I can't say I'm a fan. It undeniably works well as a way of placing pixels precisely on a page but then so does PNG, and PNG is far simpler and compresses better for computer generated content.

Sadly some information I only get as PDF's, so I have to scrape them. Easy right? It can be, if the PDF is structured sanely. But PDF isn't some well defined data structure for laying out the page, it's a Turing complete stack based computer program that can do whatever it damned well pleases. The font tables don't necessarily have ' '=32, 'A'=65, 'a'=97. Why not optimise it and get rid of all those gaps, so now ' '=0, 'A'=30? And it doesn't have to be drawn in any sane order. It can be just a mess that makes even copy & paste near impossible, and some are.

Did we really need to invent a DSL that has to be executed every time we wanted to view page? I remember it being pushed as a cool solution at the time. It doesn't look so cool now. SVG would be an improvement.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#53

Post by qubex »

867-5309 wrote: post #37
unnouinceput wrote: post #32

This has something of a misleading argument in it in the form that PDF is the "basis" for document world. PDF is not the basis. Lemme explain: for each format there is a basis and there is the most used format. For sound that's .WAV / .MP3; for pictures that's .BMP / .JPEG (or .PNG if you're a purist). And for documents that's .RTF / .PDF. You see a PDF is not the absolute basis, it's just the most convenient trade b…

if only .PDFs could easily be converted back to a useful raw format. parsing them is a bloody minefield, irregularly stuffed with proprietary metadata galore

pdftotext -layout

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#54

Post by qubex »

watersb wrote: post #28

In the early summer of 1995, the Mac community was fairly small. But it dominated the publishing industry. 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…

• Because one was proprietary, the other was not.

• Because one was top heavy, the other was not.

• Because one was a document format shared between an application that creates ne one that displays, the other was a whole server/protocol/client stack.

• Because one would insist on rigidly paginating it’s content as output by the generating application, while the other defined content that would be streamed to your client and allow it to adapt the content to your display and reflow it’s (admittedly primitive-looking) text & cetera.

• Because one was designed for use within corporations to distribute documents, while the other was intended to allow collective authorship beyond corporate confines and that this consumer/researcher technology would later seep back into the corporate domain and possibly screw up their plans.

Another way to look at it: if the Adobe folks were angsty, irritable, annoyed, or otherwise flustered, it’s probably because they knew (some?) of the above (and perhaps more) and realised that they were going to have a fight on their hands.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#55

Post by Biganon »

unnouinceput wrote: post #32

This has something of a misleading argument in it in the form that PDF is the "basis" for document world. PDF is not the basis. Lemme explain: for each format there is a basis and there is the most used format. For sound that's .WAV / .MP3; for pictures that's .BMP / .JPEG (or .PNG if you're a purist). And for documents that's .RTF / .PDF. You see a PDF is not the absolute basis, it's just the most convenient trade b…

Even a snob wouldn't want a WAV file; FLAC is lossless.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#56

Post by qubex »

netfl0 wrote: post #2

There was a period of time when I thought PDF’s days were numbered. That was over a decade ago. There is now first class support in many applications. I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

> there was a period of time when I thought PDF’s days were numbered

And indeed you are correct! A time shall arise, sooner or later in the future, a moment when the last PDF file is created, as well as a moment when a PDF is consulted for the last time. Depending on your definition of format obsolescence, this might be well beyond its expiry date, or it might actually mark the moment of death.

(Let’s forget that the Apple lineage of OSes derived from Display PostScript-using NeXTstep such as OS X [latterly macOS], iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS all use PDF as a mechanism for drawing primitive sources onto the screen.)

Anyway... after that long preamble, statements like these remind me very much of Goldfinger’s famous quote, and in honour of Sean Connery’s passing yesterday I will allow myself to elucidate:

Bond: “Do you expect me to talk?” Goldfinger: “I expect you to die!”

The latter being a very reliable expectation, but one that can sometimes take a lot longer to come true than the utterer might have in mind when they make the assertion.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#57

Post by rhn_mk1 »

pjmlp wrote: post #44
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.

The difficulty is that people don't worry about it and turn everything into PDF, even if it shouldn't. How many scientific papers are actually printed out for reading? Yet the huge majority of them are published as nothing but PDFs. Good luck reading one on mobile.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#58

Post by saagarjha »

rstuart4133 wrote: post #52
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 don't know of a better alternative to PDF that was around at the time, but I can't say I'm a fan. It undeniably works well as a way of placing pixels precisely on a page but then so does PNG, and PNG is far simpler and compresses better for computer generated content. Sadly some information I only get as PDF's, so I have to scrape them. Easy right? It can be, if the PDF is structured sanely. But PDF isn't some well…

PNG is of course an image format, and that means it doesn't really do text well. (Oh, and PDF is fully Turing complete and can even execute JavaScript, to in some contexts calling it a DSL is straining the definition a bit.)

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#59

Post by jbverschoor »

geogra4 wrote: post #4
gogopuppygogo wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF It became open source in 2008 so it’s definitely here to stay.

It is a format that doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it an image? Text? Vector graphics? Electronic forms? How about all of the above.

It renders properly. HTML doesn't even know if it wants to be an application or a document.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#60

Post by saagarjha »

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

I don't see how DjVu solves vector graphics, which is a pretty important usecase for PDF.
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