The story of the PDF (2018) • Hacker News Board

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#91

Post by 867-5309 » Sun, Nov 01, 2020, 9:18 PM UTC

unnouinceput wrote: post #69

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

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.

yes but unlike .bmp -> .jpg compression is optional. you can display exactly the same content and layout in e.g. HTML, but there is no standard to govern or reverse this

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#92

Post by pjmlp » Sun, Nov 01, 2020, 9:48 PM UTC

bane wrote: post #76

pjmlp wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That is why one pays for Adobe Acrobat.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#93

Post by ternaryoperator » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 6:24 AM UTC

sidpatil wrote: post #83

einpoklum wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

RTF is a much simpler format than ODT. RTF source code resembles TeX at first glance; ODT is based on XML. Unfortunately, it's not an open standard AFAICT.

It's not a standard in the sense of an ISO-style organization approval, but RTF has been thorougly documented by Microsoft for a very long time. [0]

[0] https://interoperability.blob.core.windows.net/files/Archive...

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#94

Post by SSLy » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 11:03 AM UTC

gautamcgoel wrote: post #81

Any have a recommendation for a good FOSS PDF reader for Linux.

zathura with the mupdf engine, evince (if you can stomach poppler's speed), sumatrapdf inside wine.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#95

Post by varispeed » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 12:02 PM UTC

When I first got a computer magazine in a PDF format in the late 90s, I knew this is going to be the future. It looked so slick on my CRT monitor and I've been looking at pages, zooming, zooming out, just for the sake of it. Whenever I open a PDF file my mind goes back in time and relives these moments of joy.

Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#96

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Re: The story of the PDF (2018)

#97

Post by daltonlp » Mon, Nov 02, 2020, 6:58 PM UTC

redman25 wrote: post #74

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 wha…

That's a very nice tool!

I attempted something similar (https://nicediff.com), and found the textual approach to be basically useless:

Tax form example: https://www.nicediff.com/view/7a5f41ba3c76ae9bb45f42a4faa8b6...