Is there a container format for HTML that includes assets such as images used in the document? I think having a single file is important. Firefox (possibly others) allow you to save a website, but you end up with a folder full of assets which isn't very user-friendly. Replacing everything with data-uris could be an option, but this would have to be some sort of standard for documents usually sent as PDF. Websites cou…
Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
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Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#62My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#63Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#64I don't like PDFs but you can sign them with certificates. This makes them great for busness contracts.
You can sign any lump of plain text with a GPG signature. I know I'm dreaming here, but... Honest question: How much traction has PDF-plus-certificate gained versus plaint-text-plus-signature?
Lots when you consider that almost everyone on every platform has a PDF reader to work with that signature, whereas not many people have GPG or GPG tools that are friendly to the non-technical users.
Re: Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)
#65Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I have no issues with generating PDFs, I think it's great for that. It's the fact that it's a format that's almost impossible, or takes an extreme amount of effort, to retrieve information from once it's been rendered that I don't like about it. It's more akin to an image format than a text format.