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Adaptive PDFs

sgaud.com

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71–80 of 91 posts

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#71

Post by crabmusket »

Theodores wrote: post #34

Very interesting, but also quite sad that today's renderers ignore the finer points of the specification. On a related note, I like the ability of good old HTML to be able to change text for different human readers, based on their chosen locale. With this I can change units such as litres to 'fluid flagon ounces' or whatever it is they use in the USA, or I can drop in a friendly greeting in a foreign language. I have…

What part of HTML is letting you adapt e.g. units of measurement by locale? Presumably there's also CSD and JS involved?

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#72

Post by crabmusket »

> I wanted to make a PDF where humans see the formatted document but machines extract clean markdown.

If you're not yet in possession of a PDF somebody else gave you, and you aren't about to send something to a printer to make a physical copy... why would you bring a new PDF into this world?

This is what markup languages are for, and the most widespread format - readable on almost any device - is HTML.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#74

Post by pg_bot »

jexp wrote: post #8

Shouldn’t it be possible since forever to put machine readable source information into PDF metadata. It’s more a problem of the tools and programs generating the PDFs. We spend millions turning structured information into PDFs and billions to extract the same data from a printer rendering language

Yes this is already possible. You can look up the ZUGFeRD standard for an example of how this is done for German invoices.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#75

Post by pg_bot »

pg_bot wrote: post #74
jexp wrote: post #8

Shouldn’t it be possible since forever to put machine readable source information into PDF metadata. It’s more a problem of the tools and programs generating the PDFs. We spend millions turning structured information into PDFs and billions to extract the same data from a printer rendering language

Yes this is already possible. You can look up the ZUGFeRD standard for an example of how this is done for German invoices.

See also:

https://pdfa.org/resource/pdf-2-0-application-note-002-assoc...

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#76

Post by SarthakGaud »

dang wrote: post #68
SarthakGaud wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I wrote it by hand but I had to get my presentation fixed from an LLM cause its not my first language, I will keep this in mind. Thanks

It sounds like you got bitten by the dynamic I wrote about here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48467726 : that is, using an LLM to process text for a limited reason (such as to improve its English) and then finding that the LLM left lots of other fingerprints, causing readers to perceive the entire thing as genai. We're seeing a ton of this right now! In case it's helpful, here's something I've been saying whe…

I will stop using LLMs to restructure, I got too many feedbacks pointing towards the same direction. Next posts are gonna be sarthak exclusive

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#78

Post by Hendrikto »

mc32 wrote: post #14
gpvos wrote: post #4

I would suggest changing the title to the actual title of the article: Adaptive PDFs. Assuming the program works, the PDF will not actually look different to me than to anyone else looking at it, so there is nothing that "changes based on who is reading". It is just that text extraction, a wholly different (and much fuzzier) process than viewing the PDF, and something that the same person can do, will now return stru…

Having slightly different versions would certainly be a help in identifying leakers of certain kinds of documents to increase the odds of identifying leakers. That would be of interest to some kinds of organizations or departments within organizations.

Just have slightly different versions then. This has always been possible.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#79

Post by Diti »

crabmusket wrote: post #71
Theodores wrote: post #34

Very interesting, but also quite sad that today's renderers ignore the finer points of the specification. On a related note, I like the ability of good old HTML to be able to change text for different human readers, based on their chosen locale. With this I can change units such as litres to 'fluid flagon ounces' or whatever it is they use in the USA, or I can drop in a friendly greeting in a foreign language. I have…

What part of HTML is letting you adapt e.g. units of measurement by locale? Presumably there's also CSD and JS involved?

Not sure about HTML, but you can use `` [1] in SVG and it will display localized text based on the `system’anguage` property.

[1]: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/SVG/Reference/E...

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#80

Post by gpvos »

mc32 wrote: post #14
gpvos wrote: post #4

I would suggest changing the title to the actual title of the article: Adaptive PDFs. Assuming the program works, the PDF will not actually look different to me than to anyone else looking at it, so there is nothing that "changes based on who is reading". It is just that text extraction, a wholly different (and much fuzzier) process than viewing the PDF, and something that the same person can do, will now return stru…

Having slightly different versions would certainly be a help in identifying leakers of certain kinds of documents to increase the odds of identifying leakers. That would be of interest to some kinds of organizations or departments within organizations.

PDF has lots of facilities to do that.
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