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The story of the PDF (2018)

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Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#71

Post by cpach »

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…

Just out of curiosity, why the hex editor? Isn’t RTF just ASCII?

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#72

Post by BelleOfTheBall »

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

Man, I haven't seen a DjVu file in years. It used to be somewhat common in scans of magazines and other media that relied on images. Pity that it didn't catch on, although I suppose it still could, if some of its benefits were refined. I find that larger PDFs tend to tank optimization, is that a problem for DjVu files at all?

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#73

Post by marcinzm »

giantDinosaur wrote: post #8
marcinzm wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's basically digital paper and since paper can be all those things so can PDFs.

Can paper run ad-tracking analytics scripts though? ;-)

Have a single copy of the paper in a place with a sign in sheet and now you're tracking everyone who looks at it.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#74

Post by redman25 »

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…

PDFs act more like images than text. I made a tool for diffing PDFs at the visual level a little while ago (http://parepdf.com) because I needed a way to see the explicit differences between PDFs.

Diffing PDFs at the textual level is a much harder problem though since lines of text need to be reordered and concatenated with each other. Unfortunately there is nothing built into the format that allows you to know what line belongs with what other line beyond guesswork.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#75

Post by maxerickson »

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…

The analogy is not particularly apt.

For one thing, PDF can encode information that rtf cannot.

There's also lots of approaches to document layout (the underlying descriptions of what should appear, not just different styles).

Pedantically, the analogy works somewhat better for postscript than rtf, but not really, except maybe the bmp->png part.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#76

Post by bane »

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.

Wait until you get a PDF which is just a bunch of poorly scanned JPGs and no OCR.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#77

Post by Finnucane »

BlueTemplar wrote: post #67
Finnucane wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

For online and authoring, sure. If they print the books, it gets converted to a pdf.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#78

Post by dharmab »

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.

The right way to do this is via digitally signed PDFs. The signature is invalidated if the document is edited (other than adding a signature).

Disclaimer: I work for Adobe, but not directly on Document Cloud.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#79

Post by Finnucane »

axiolite wrote: post #19
Finnucane wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

There's nothing special about PDF. Only reason PDF is useful is because it's easy to convert to/from Postscript and Adobe was pushing out a free viewer for PDFs but not Postscript files. That, and the difference in fees they chose to charge on the formats.

That may be true, but it is so deeply embedded into publishing workflows now it would be hard to dislodge.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#80

Post by SSLy »

sjy wrote: post #35
easton wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given that PDFs can embed JavaScript, they can embed ad tracking software, yes. And Linux VMs. And a port of WinAmp.

I don’t think any of that is possible with the JavaScript APIs exposed (if any) by common PDF readers. I’ve tried to do useful things with JavaScript in a PDF and failed utterly. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32597283/can-javascript-...

Paizo uses JS to trigger map layers (for RPG products)
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