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The story of the PDF (2018)

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Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#61

Post by saagarjha »

qubex wrote: post #54
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 cli…

HyperCard did some of those things!

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#62

Post by yyyk »

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 doesn't support multiple pages and didn't supplant GIF until 2000 or so. TIFF does, but in practice it's always uncompressed (did it even support compression in the 90s?). Either solution didn't allow for text blocks or vector zooming or form fields.

It's not difficult to improve upon a sane subset of PDF, but that would require backing and coordination. Reviving XPS (but not under MS auspices) should also be possible.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#63

Post by jfk13 »

qubex wrote: post #53
867-5309 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sometimes works well, depending on the structure and content of the PDF. Other times it's hopeless.

Certainly not a general solution. Indeed, there isn't one, because the design of PDF allows far too many things that can't be reliably deciphered back to the source data.

That's why Adobe is throwing all their ML at it, to try and come up with something that guesses near enough right more of the time.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#64

Post by diggan »

Biganon wrote: post #55
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.

Sometimes it's not about preferences but about what's most widely supported. For example, my Octatrack only supports wav/aiff files so that's what I'm stuck with.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#65

Post by einpoklum »

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…

> because otherwise I think it would have been Microsoft Word.

No, those are formats with completely different scopes. They don't compete and are essentially non-interchangeable.

> There was a time when papers, books, resumes, contracts, etc. almost always came as Word.

There was never such a time. I mean, sure, you could (and can) send people Word/LibreOffice documents, but things that needed some reproducibility and finality [1] were distributed or published is MS-Word format - almost ever. Postscript used to be pretty popular though.

[1] - Yes, PDFs can be edited too, I know.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#66

Post by einpoklum »

vram22 wrote: post #51
webreac wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

In what ways is it preferable to ODT (OpenDocument format)?

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#67

Post by BlueTemplar »

Finnucane wrote: post #5
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.

It's pretty much essential to the publishing industry. Until we actually stop printing books, we'll be using pdfs.

Some in the publishing industry have actually moved to HTML - O'Reilly comes to mind.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#68

Post by Closi »

pjmlp wrote: post #45
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.

As someone that does this, it’s because they are harder to change for the average user, and that barrier also means ‘don’t do it’ in a soft sense. If I send a PPT you are almost saying to a client “you can edit this if you want, because I provided it in a format which is designed for editing rather than a format that was designed for view-only”.

99% of the time it stops the “Oh great, so when you took that presentation we prepared for you as a consultancy, you kept our logo on it but changed the content and also removed our caveats!”

Also it stops people seeing my personal notes and comments that I have included throughout the document if it’s a ppt, and it also stops me sharing the data behind any graphs which is normally internally stored in the ppt file. You can set a ppt as view only, but nobody does it and clients don’t like it.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#69

Post by unnouinceput »

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

PDF is a printing format, not an editing format - hence the trouble when you want to convert it back to an editable document. It's the same as going back from .JPEG to .BMP, you'll never get back your original pixels.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#70

Post by pjmlp »

rhn_mk1 wrote: post #57
pjmlp wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most of them, conference proceedings by Springer and friends are still a thing.

I have Acrobat and Moon+ Reader on my mobile.

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