The story of the PDF (2018)
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The story of the PDF (2018)
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Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#2There 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.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#3There 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF
It became open source in 2008 so it’s definitely here to stay.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#4There 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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF It became open source in 2008 so it’s definitely here to stay.
It is a format that doesn't know what it wants to be.
Is it an image?
Text?
Vector graphics?
Electronic forms?
How about all of the above.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#5There 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.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#6I'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 one chapter was newer than the others. That's one reason I really like PDF -- it's one file, self-contained, and linear.
On the other hand, I really wish it was more diff'able. If for example a credit card company changes one word in their terms & conditions PDF, it seems like 90% of document changes at the binary level. I know that PDF diff tools exist, but there must be tremendous internal complexity in the PDF format for tiny changes to alter the whole structure.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF It became open source in 2008 so it’s definitely here to stay.
It is a format that doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it an image? Text? Vector graphics? Electronic forms? How about all of the above.
It's basically digital paper and since paper can be all those things so can PDFs.
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#8Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a format that doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it an image? Text? Vector graphics? Electronic forms? How about all of the above.
It's basically digital paper and since paper can be all those things so can PDFs.
Can paper run ad-tracking analytics scripts though? ;-)
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#9Original article, without so many obnoxious ads: https://tedium.co/2018/02/27/pdf-file-format-history/
Re: The story of the PDF (2018)
#10I'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…
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