4 ms·

Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

31 points by shubhamjain 10y ago

diimdeep 10y ago
+1, pdf cant do this http://explorableexplanations.com/ http://explorableexplanations.com/
james_morton 10y ago
PDF was made for printing, not displaying. As someone who has been in the printing business for a long time, PDF was a god send, no more worrying about missing fonts, no more page margin differences, no more driver discrepancies. What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge.
- Aldo_MX 10y ago
  Emphasis in "printing, not displaying". The objection should not be "PDF must die", but "people mustn't use PDF for other purpose than printing".
- delcaran 10y ago
  > What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge. Not really, it depends on the PDF software. I have printed the same bill with SumatraPDF, Acrobat Reader X and Acrobat Reader DC: different fonts, different sizes and missing logos...
  - Arcanum-XIII 10y ago
    That's why when you're trying to print professionally, you're gonna use the original software and not something that try to re implement it. I know it's sad, because open source, but when a (good) standard exist that is closed source, we have to made due, till something arguably better exist.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    If the underlying document doesn't embed the fonts it uses, then the reader would perform substitution. This causes different outputs on different readers. It's more of a PDF producing application problem that fail to either embed the rather uncommon or proprietary fonts.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - Freak_NL 10y ago
    Usually it is the PDF that is at fault, or rather, the assumptions made by the author (or the authoring software). A PDF meant to be portable and usable for a long time should embed all fonts used. If you get different fonts and sizes in different viewers, that tends to hint at a lack of embedded fonts, leaving the PDF viewer to substitute using its fall back fonts. Most PDFs I come across tend to come with embedded fonts and work just fine on any decent PDF-viewer.
- tkvtkvtkvtkv 10y ago
  portrait page layout on a landscape screen when what we really want is multi-column landscape layout
- creshal 10y ago
  PDF1/A is a great standard for printable documents. Because it doesn't try to do anything else. Regular PDF with embedded flash, quicktime, HTML/XML forms and/or javascript, is a nightmare.
  - blowski 10y ago
    A few years back, I had to borrow someone's computer to fill out the UK passport form. It was full of extensions that only worked in the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - which wasn't available on Ubuntu (at the time). I couldn't even print the form and fill it by hand.
    - cpach 10y ago
      Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)
      - creshal 10y ago
        Doing forms in PDF directly is not the most unreasonable idea. The problem is it's not one, but three ridiculously overcomplex specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Interactive_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Inter...
        blowski 10y ago
        It's fine if it's the easiest method available with universal support. In this case in failed on both counts.
- clockwerx 10y ago
  He didnt add these important words: "on the web" PDF as a primary info exchange format online is stupid and needs to die
ocdtrekkie 10y ago
From an additional tweet, we can see that Guido's biggest reason for disliking PDF is the text not being responsive. This is actually my FAVORITE thing about PDFs. They're like pages. They perfectly replicate the book medium they are often taken from. If I want to make something bigger or smaller, I can do that, and it just works with zoom. It's not trying to guess what I'm trying to do and adjust things in ways I don't want. I'm sure it's an unpopular opinion, but I love the PDF.
- jwdunne 10y ago
  They're delightful to read on mobile too with a reader that maintains zoom and allows continuous scrolling. I don't mind flipping the page but it's far more friction than flipping the page of an actual book since you do it about 5 to 10 times more.
  - cpach 10y ago
    What mobile PDF readers do you recommend? I’ve been longing for zoom fixation and continuous scrolling but had no idea this existed in current apps.
    - jwdunne 10y ago
      Foxit PDF Reader does this beautifully. It's far better on iOS but still works better than the alternatives on Android. Trust me, it is a DREAM to read PDFs on mobile with Foxit. I avoided PDFs for years because iBooks and Kindle suck on mobile. Acrobat failed to even render the text in a PDF I tried so that was a non starter.
      - cpach 10y ago
        Cool! Will try Foxit then.
- foota 10y ago
  I just wish that PDFs were more developer friendly, from what I've seen they're kind of a painful format (not that the modern web page is any easier to read the source of but still)
shubhamjain 10y ago
I am wondering why there is still no compiled HTML format in any age when web pages can render almost everything (at least, I can't think of any from the top of my head). With base64, images can be embedded without any external dependency and I think it should be easy to reduce what Javascript can do to address privacy concerns (like, disabling XHR). A web page renderer is more ubiquitous than PDF. Web pages are responsive and everyone can build one with just a simple text editor. So why do we need PDF?
- wfunction 10y ago
  MHTML?
- jeandejean 10y ago
  > "A web page renderer is more ubiquitous than PDF" Just any browser can render a PDF as well. PDF is good because it guarantees the formatting intended by the author.
  - shubhamjain 10y ago
    Most mobile browsers can't the, last time I checked. Although, it's easy enough to read PDF with so many options on Android, but opening another viewer and then zooming, scrolling is just painful. PDF might guarantee the formatting but I think it should only matter when it comes to printing. Besides that, fixed size containers and fluid grids give plenty of flexibility with web documents. So in case, the author intends to have fixed formatting, I think it's achievable with HTML and CSS.
  - oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
    And PDF is bad because it guarantees the formatting intended by the author. The author's formatting might work on a single screen, but it sure as hell won't work on the multitude of devices that access the web. PDF guarantees the end print result, but it shouldn't be used for anything else.
    - SFJulie 10y ago
dempseye 10y ago
He doesn't like PDF because it doesn't reflow to fit his screen, but that is precisely the point of PDF.
- sergiotapia 10y ago
  /thread
legulere 10y ago
Probably it's actually the other way around. PDFs usually fulfill lots of typographic criteria for better legibility like use of justified text and ligatures that are hardly used in HTML or badly supported. The only real problems are with two column text moving around is annoying and you often have to zoom in. However with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore.
- cpach 10y ago
  ”with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore” I really can’t agree with you there. Despite that, the reading experience suffers a lot IMO.
  - legulere 10y ago
    Yeah maybe I was a bit too enthusiastic, but it's a dramatic improvement compared to before.
    - cpach 10y ago
      I agree :)
0xmohit 10y ago
Quoting https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056 https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056 @eugeneglybin Proprietary though it is, DOC[X] is easier to reflow to fit my screen. Also, I guess PDF fans don't use mobile screens enough. Reflow isn't about PDF per se, it is about the underlying reader being used. That said, it is certainly a much better alternative than DOC[X]. Different versions of Microsoft Word tend to produce different output for the same document. With PDF, you are guaranteed the same output upon printing to any device; which isn't quite the case with DOC[X].
- cpach 10y ago
  Are there really any PDF viewers that does reflow? I’ve never heard of that before.
  - 0xmohit 10y ago
    The PDF creating application needs to ensure that the document is accessible. Adobe Reader (on desktop) does support reflow [0]. Adobe Reader on Android also supports reflow [1]. [0] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-accessibility-features.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac... [1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-free-PDF-reader-on-Android-that-can-reflow-and-zoom-text-at-the-same-time-So-far-Ive-evaluated-Adobe-Reader-Polaris-Office-and-Qoppa-among-others https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-free-PDF-reader-on-Andr...
  - arximboldi 10y ago
    I use this tool to reflow PDF papers for an e-book reader: http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/ http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/
Havoc 10y ago
PDFs are great. Things look the same everywhere. Word docs on the other hand god help you if there is some minor difference in Word version / printer model etc and you're shooting for consistency.
mytddu 10y ago
My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?
- nitrogen 10y ago
  Pdf2txt wasn't helpful? http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.h...
- IngoBlechschmid 10y ago
  Sure, the Linux tool "pdftotext" works just fine for this. Two small caveats: ligatures get converted to proper Unicode ligatures and not their ASCII fallback (as one might want or expect) and of course complex mathematical formulas are rendered badly.
  - mytddu 10y ago
    I've tried both pdftotext and pdf2txt and I remember not being satisfied with either. Neither seem to handle non-ASCII characters very well, but I'll take another look soon though.
- based2 10y ago
  https://pdfbox.apache.org/ https://pdfbox.apache.org/
cpach 10y ago
I agree with the comments pointing out that PDF was not primarily intended for screen usage. However, it’s quite a good format for typeset text. What if the problem is not really with the format itself, but the way it us used? What if the PDF file was customized to the specific device they will be opened on? It would probably not be impossible to take EPUB source and then convert to PDF via (La)TeX, with good typograhic settings for the specific device. For my laptop screen the page would be around 28 centimers wide, perhaps set in three or four columns. For my smartphone, one column is enough. With this setup one would not have to scroll up and down while reading the columns, which is the case now when reading e.g. scientific papers. And because of the great quality of the TeX engine it might be easier to achieve a good layout than hacking around with HTML/CSS/Javascript.
0xFFC 10y ago
I don't have any problem with pdf's, and I think they are wonderful, specially for reading books. They almost simulate same experience of reading old fashion book, but in computer ! I like the idea of not being responsive. Because let be honest being responsive would come with so much headache. Every device then render it in a different way. But I think the problem is software's we use as pdf viewers. Companies tend to ignore pdf's. They think if they can render pdf's , that is enough.No it isn't. Some pdf viewer cant get fit-to-width right.It kind of feels like software companies tend to ignore pdf's. Apple has done wonderful job with their word lookup functionality . If English is your mother tongue then you don't have fucking idea how helpful is that. I am PC user , Ask Cortana functionality (in pdf's) in Edge made me ditch Google-Chrome for Edge entirely, and believe me I spend all day in browser 24/7 and my whole life was in chrome before ditching it. (just imagine how important that simple functionality is for non-English speakers) I don't know how to emphasize it more, but believe me, that simple Lookup (without opening new browser tab and searching for "define $word" is the most functionality most of non-English users want). p.s. I wish google add pdf word lookup functionality to this : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-by-goog/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...
darkhorn 10y ago
I don't like PDFs but you can sign them with certificates. This makes them great for busness contracts.
- girzel 10y ago
  You can sign any lump of plain text with a GPG signature. I know I'm dreaming here, but... Honest question: How much traction has PDF-plus-certificate gained versus plaint-text-plus-signature?
  - PointerReaper 10y ago
    Lots when you consider that almost everyone on every platform has a PDF reader to work with that signature, whereas not many people have GPG or GPG tools that are friendly to the non-technical users.
zelcon 10y ago
Both PDF and HTML are inferior substitutes for proper TeX formats.
- cpach 10y ago
  What do you mean? TeX is a source format, not a display format.
Angostura 10y ago
So lets see, you would prefer (say) schools to upload letters to parents on their Web site in the original docx format? Because that's what will happen if you kill PDF.
girzel 10y ago
PDFs are great for reading, but nothing else. If you want to do something with the text, then plain text or some derived format is better. I would include searching as "doing something". PDF viewers can search, but it's always more painful than searching plain text, and I would say if you're using search to simply locate your subject in the file, then the file author has failed to provide a sufficient TOC/index. To me, the case in point is the PDF documentation of LaTeX packages. The PDF files are great as a demonstration of what the package does, but they are awful for learning how to do it in your own documents. I am writing LaTeX in plain text, in an editor. I want the package documentation in plain text, in my editor. I sure as hell do not want to fire up a separate PDF viewer and then start flicking through pages, just to discover the correct package option incantations. I love PDFs, but I only love them as a prose reading experience: open the file, start at the top, read until the end. When I make PDFs for other people to consume, I usually make three different layouts: print, screen, and tablet/mobile. Thanks to LaTeX, that's easy to do.
sambeau 10y ago
All these people pointing out that PDF was for printing, not for screen display, are I believe (at least partly) incorrect. I distinctly remember PDF being touted as a screen display technology. Adobe (and the world) already had a printable format: Postscript. But PostScript was interpreted and had loops and other programming constructs that made it hard to stream and to add hyperlinks to. PDF was explained to us as 'unrolled Postscript'. PDF was also claimed to be much faster to display as it didn't require a interpreter although NeXT (and SGi) used 'Display Postscript' for their windowing systems. As someone who was involved in print media at the time the font & raster-image embedding was also a godsend but that was a characteristic of the PDF file format rather than the PDF drawing technology. PDF was deemed so suitable as a display technology that the Mac OS X window server was hailed as 'Display PDF' on launch and a big deal was made of how a Mac could not only display exactly what a printer would show but that high-resolution printing was already built in: everything was essentially already being printed to the screen. Although seldom mentioned theses days I assume the Quartz 2D render is still Display PDF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript
bigkm 10y ago
When you kill Python 2, your opinion will be worth something, until then stfu
camillomiller 10y ago
Meh. Let's be real, PDF has its use, it's all a matter of who uses it how. That's exactly the same with HTML. Which of course is something you can't really use for digital contracts, for example. Wouldn't it be better to educate users to choose the right software tool for the right job, instead of generalizing the problem with shortsighted assertions?
chmaynard 10y ago
Smart guy, stupid tweet. If you decide to take an extreme position to attract attention or vent, at least say something intelligent.
_jomo 10y ago
Is there a container format for HTML that includes assets such as images used in the document? I think having a single file is important. Firefox (possibly others) allow you to save a website, but you end up with a folder full of assets which isn't very user-friendly. Replacing everything with data-uris could be an option, but this would have to be some sort of standard for documents usually sent as PDF. Websites could then create the "raw" document and display it in an iframe, so the website's template is separated from the document.
- iofj 10y ago
  KDE's konqueror has a "web archive" format. I don't think any of the other big browsers have such a thing. http://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/html/openSUSE_113/opensuse-apps/cha.konqueror.html#sec.konq.saving http://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/html/openSUSE_113/open...
- based2 10y ago
  http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2429934/is-it-possible-to-put-binary-image-data-into-html-markup-and-then-get-the-image http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2429934/is-it-possible-to...
based2 10y ago
https://www.adobe.com/uk/epaper/tips/acr5reflow/ https://www.adobe.com/uk/epaper/tips/acr5reflow/ https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/4816 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/4816

31 points by shubhamjain 10y ago

+1, pdf cant do this http://explorableexplanations.com/ http://explorableexplanations.com/

PDF was made for printing, not displaying. As someone who has been in the printing business for a long time, PDF was a god send, no more worrying about missing fonts, no more page margin differences, no more driver discrepancies. What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge.

Aldo_MX 10y ago
Emphasis in "printing, not displaying". The objection should not be "PDF must die", but "people mustn't use PDF for other purpose than printing".
delcaran 10y ago
> What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge. Not really, it depends on the PDF software. I have printed the same bill with SumatraPDF, Acrobat Reader X and Acrobat Reader DC: different fonts, different sizes and missing logos...
- Arcanum-XIII 10y ago
  That's why when you're trying to print professionally, you're gonna use the original software and not something that try to re implement it. I know it's sad, because open source, but when a (good) standard exist that is closed source, we have to made due, till something arguably better exist.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  If the underlying document doesn't embed the fonts it uses, then the reader would perform substitution. This causes different outputs on different readers. It's more of a PDF producing application problem that fail to either embed the rather uncommon or proprietary fonts.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- Freak_NL 10y ago
  Usually it is the PDF that is at fault, or rather, the assumptions made by the author (or the authoring software). A PDF meant to be portable and usable for a long time should embed all fonts used. If you get different fonts and sizes in different viewers, that tends to hint at a lack of embedded fonts, leaving the PDF viewer to substitute using its fall back fonts. Most PDFs I come across tend to come with embedded fonts and work just fine on any decent PDF-viewer.
tkvtkvtkvtkv 10y ago
portrait page layout on a landscape screen when what we really want is multi-column landscape layout
creshal 10y ago
PDF1/A is a great standard for printable documents. Because it doesn't try to do anything else. Regular PDF with embedded flash, quicktime, HTML/XML forms and/or javascript, is a nightmare.
- blowski 10y ago
  A few years back, I had to borrow someone's computer to fill out the UK passport form. It was full of extensions that only worked in the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - which wasn't available on Ubuntu (at the time). I couldn't even print the form and fill it by hand.
  - cpach 10y ago
    Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)
    - creshal 10y ago
      Doing forms in PDF directly is not the most unreasonable idea. The problem is it's not one, but three ridiculously overcomplex specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Interactive_elements https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Inter...
      - blowski 10y ago
        It's fine if it's the easiest method available with universal support. In this case in failed on both counts.
clockwerx 10y ago
He didnt add these important words: "on the web" PDF as a primary info exchange format online is stupid and needs to die

ocdtrekkie 10y ago

From an additional tweet, we can see that Guido's biggest reason for disliking PDF is the text not being responsive. This is actually my FAVORITE thing about PDFs. They're like pages. They perfectly replicate the book medium they are often taken from. If I want to make something bigger or smaller, I can do that, and it just works with zoom. It's not trying to guess what I'm trying to do and adjust things in ways I don't want. I'm sure it's an unpopular opinion, but I love the PDF.

jwdunne 10y ago
They're delightful to read on mobile too with a reader that maintains zoom and allows continuous scrolling. I don't mind flipping the page but it's far more friction than flipping the page of an actual book since you do it about 5 to 10 times more.
- cpach 10y ago
  What mobile PDF readers do you recommend? I’ve been longing for zoom fixation and continuous scrolling but had no idea this existed in current apps.
  - jwdunne 10y ago
    Foxit PDF Reader does this beautifully. It's far better on iOS but still works better than the alternatives on Android. Trust me, it is a DREAM to read PDFs on mobile with Foxit. I avoided PDFs for years because iBooks and Kindle suck on mobile. Acrobat failed to even render the text in a PDF I tried so that was a non starter.
    - cpach 10y ago
      Cool! Will try Foxit then.
foota 10y ago
I just wish that PDFs were more developer friendly, from what I've seen they're kind of a painful format (not that the modern web page is any easier to read the source of but still)

shubhamjain 10y ago

I am wondering why there is still no compiled HTML format in any age when web pages can render almost everything (at least, I can't think of any from the top of my head). With base64, images can be embedded without any external dependency and I think it should be easy to reduce what Javascript can do to address privacy concerns (like, disabling XHR). A web page renderer is more ubiquitous than PDF. Web pages are responsive and everyone can build one with just a simple text editor. So why do we need PDF?

wfunction 10y ago
MHTML?
jeandejean 10y ago
> "A web page renderer is more ubiquitous than PDF" Just any browser can render a PDF as well. PDF is good because it guarantees the formatting intended by the author.
- shubhamjain 10y ago
  Most mobile browsers can't the, last time I checked. Although, it's easy enough to read PDF with so many options on Android, but opening another viewer and then zooming, scrolling is just painful. PDF might guarantee the formatting but I think it should only matter when it comes to printing. Besides that, fixed size containers and fluid grids give plenty of flexibility with web documents. So in case, the author intends to have fixed formatting, I think it's achievable with HTML and CSS.
- oneeyedpigeon 10y ago
  And PDF is bad because it guarantees the formatting intended by the author. The author's formatting might work on a single screen, but it sure as hell won't work on the multitude of devices that access the web. PDF guarantees the end print result, but it shouldn't be used for anything else.
  - SFJulie 10y ago

dempseye 10y ago

He doesn't like PDF because it doesn't reflow to fit his screen, but that is precisely the point of PDF.

sergiotapia 10y ago
/thread

legulere 10y ago

Probably it's actually the other way around. PDFs usually fulfill lots of typographic criteria for better legibility like use of justified text and ligatures that are hardly used in HTML or badly supported. The only real problems are with two column text moving around is annoying and you often have to zoom in. However with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore.

cpach 10y ago
”with a modern touchpad offering 2D scrolling and pinch to zoom this is hardly a problem anymore” I really can’t agree with you there. Despite that, the reading experience suffers a lot IMO.
- legulere 10y ago
  Yeah maybe I was a bit too enthusiastic, but it's a dramatic improvement compared to before.
  - cpach 10y ago
    I agree :)

0xmohit 10y ago

Quoting https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056 https://twitter.com/gvanrossum/status/533337876415533056 @eugeneglybin Proprietary though it is, DOC[X] is easier to reflow to fit my screen. Also, I guess PDF fans don't use mobile screens enough. Reflow isn't about PDF per se, it is about the underlying reader being used. That said, it is certainly a much better alternative than DOC[X]. Different versions of Microsoft Word tend to produce different output for the same document. With PDF, you are guaranteed the same output upon printing to any device; which isn't quite the case with DOC[X].

cpach 10y ago
Are there really any PDF viewers that does reflow? I’ve never heard of that before.
- 0xmohit 10y ago
  The PDF creating application needs to ensure that the document is accessible. Adobe Reader (on desktop) does support reflow [0]. Adobe Reader on Android also supports reflow [1]. [0] https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-accessibility-features.html https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac... [1] https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-free-PDF-reader-on-Android-that-can-reflow-and-zoom-text-at-the-same-time-So-far-Ive-evaluated-Adobe-Reader-Polaris-Office-and-Qoppa-among-others https://www.quora.com/Whats-the-best-free-PDF-reader-on-Andr...
- arximboldi 10y ago
  I use this tool to reflow PDF papers for an e-book reader: http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/ http://willus.com/k2pdfopt/

Havoc 10y ago

PDFs are great. Things look the same everywhere. Word docs on the other hand god help you if there is some minor difference in Word version / printer model etc and you're shooting for consistency.

mytddu 10y ago

My gripe with PDF is that it's the standard format for academic publishing, rendering a whole mass of scientific knowledge largely inaccessible for text processing purposes. I've wanted to analyze the Libgen archive of journal articles for a long time but have never found an adequate solution for extracting text from PDFs. Any suggestions on this?

nitrogen 10y ago
Pdf2txt wasn't helpful? http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.html http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/precise/man1/pdf2txt.1.h...
IngoBlechschmid 10y ago
Sure, the Linux tool "pdftotext" works just fine for this. Two small caveats: ligatures get converted to proper Unicode ligatures and not their ASCII fallback (as one might want or expect) and of course complex mathematical formulas are rendered badly.
- mytddu 10y ago
  I've tried both pdftotext and pdf2txt and I remember not being satisfied with either. Neither seem to handle non-ASCII characters very well, but I'll take another look soon though.
based2 10y ago
https://pdfbox.apache.org/ https://pdfbox.apache.org/

cpach 10y ago

I agree with the comments pointing out that PDF was not primarily intended for screen usage. However, it’s quite a good format for typeset text. What if the problem is not really with the format itself, but the way it us used? What if the PDF file was customized to the specific device they will be opened on? It would probably not be impossible to take EPUB source and then convert to PDF via (La)TeX, with good typograhic settings for the specific device. For my laptop screen the page would be around 28 centimers wide, perhaps set in three or four columns. For my smartphone, one column is enough. With this setup one would not have to scroll up and down while reading the columns, which is the case now when reading e.g. scientific papers. And because of the great quality of the TeX engine it might be easier to achieve a good layout than hacking around with HTML/CSS/Javascript.

0xFFC 10y ago

I don't have any problem with pdf's, and I think they are wonderful, specially for reading books. They almost simulate same experience of reading old fashion book, but in computer ! I like the idea of not being responsive. Because let be honest being responsive would come with so much headache. Every device then render it in a different way. But I think the problem is software's we use as pdf viewers. Companies tend to ignore pdf's. They think if they can render pdf's , that is enough.No it isn't. Some pdf viewer cant get fit-to-width right.It kind of feels like software companies tend to ignore pdf's. Apple has done wonderful job with their word lookup functionality . If English is your mother tongue then you don't have fucking idea how helpful is that. I am PC user , Ask Cortana functionality (in pdf's) in Edge made me ditch Google-Chrome for Edge entirely, and believe me I spend all day in browser 24/7 and my whole life was in chrome before ditching it. (just imagine how important that simple functionality is for non-English speakers) I don't know how to emphasize it more, but believe me, that simple Lookup (without opening new browser tab and searching for "define $word" is the most functionality most of non-English users want). p.s. I wish google add pdf word lookup functionality to this : https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-by-goog/mgijmajocgfcbeboacabfgobmjgjcoja https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/google-dictionary-...

darkhorn 10y ago

I don't like PDFs but you can sign them with certificates. This makes them great for busness contracts.

girzel 10y ago
You can sign any lump of plain text with a GPG signature. I know I'm dreaming here, but... Honest question: How much traction has PDF-plus-certificate gained versus plaint-text-plus-signature?
- PointerReaper 10y ago
  Lots when you consider that almost everyone on every platform has a PDF reader to work with that signature, whereas not many people have GPG or GPG tools that are friendly to the non-technical users.

zelcon 10y ago

Both PDF and HTML are inferior substitutes for proper TeX formats.

cpach 10y ago
What do you mean? TeX is a source format, not a display format.

Angostura 10y ago

So lets see, you would prefer (say) schools to upload letters to parents on their Web site in the original docx format? Because that's what will happen if you kill PDF.

girzel 10y ago

PDFs are great for reading, but nothing else. If you want to do something with the text, then plain text or some derived format is better. I would include searching as "doing something". PDF viewers can search, but it's always more painful than searching plain text, and I would say if you're using search to simply locate your subject in the file, then the file author has failed to provide a sufficient TOC/index. To me, the case in point is the PDF documentation of LaTeX packages. The PDF files are great as a demonstration of what the package does, but they are awful for learning how to do it in your own documents. I am writing LaTeX in plain text, in an editor. I want the package documentation in plain text, in my editor. I sure as hell do not want to fire up a separate PDF viewer and then start flicking through pages, just to discover the correct package option incantations. I love PDFs, but I only love them as a prose reading experience: open the file, start at the top, read until the end. When I make PDFs for other people to consume, I usually make three different layouts: print, screen, and tablet/mobile. Thanks to LaTeX, that's easy to do.

sambeau 10y ago

All these people pointing out that PDF was for printing, not for screen display, are I believe (at least partly) incorrect. I distinctly remember PDF being touted as a screen display technology. Adobe (and the world) already had a printable format: Postscript. But PostScript was interpreted and had loops and other programming constructs that made it hard to stream and to add hyperlinks to. PDF was explained to us as 'unrolled Postscript'. PDF was also claimed to be much faster to display as it didn't require a interpreter although NeXT (and SGi) used 'Display Postscript' for their windowing systems. As someone who was involved in print media at the time the font & raster-image embedding was also a godsend but that was a characteristic of the PDF file format rather than the PDF drawing technology. PDF was deemed so suitable as a display technology that the Mac OS X window server was hailed as 'Display PDF' on launch and a big deal was made of how a Mac could not only display exactly what a printer would show but that high-resolution printing was already built in: everything was essentially already being printed to the screen. Although seldom mentioned theses days I assume the Quartz 2D render is still Display PDF? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Display_PostScript

bigkm 10y ago

When you kill Python 2, your opinion will be worth something, until then stfu

camillomiller 10y ago

Meh. Let's be real, PDF has its use, it's all a matter of who uses it how. That's exactly the same with HTML. Which of course is something you can't really use for digital contracts, for example. Wouldn't it be better to educate users to choose the right software tool for the right job, instead of generalizing the problem with shortsighted assertions?

chmaynard 10y ago

Smart guy, stupid tweet. If you decide to take an extreme position to attract attention or vent, at least say something intelligent.

_jomo 10y ago

Is there a container format for HTML that includes assets such as images used in the document? I think having a single file is important. Firefox (possibly others) allow you to save a website, but you end up with a folder full of assets which isn't very user-friendly. Replacing everything with data-uris could be an option, but this would have to be some sort of standard for documents usually sent as PDF. Websites could then create the "raw" document and display it in an iframe, so the website's template is separated from the document.

iofj 10y ago
KDE's konqueror has a "web archive" format. I don't think any of the other big browsers have such a thing. http://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/html/openSUSE_113/opensuse-apps/cha.konqueror.html#sec.konq.saving http://doc.opensuse.org/documentation/html/openSUSE_113/open...
based2 10y ago
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2429934/is-it-possible-to-put-binary-image-data-into-html-markup-and-then-get-the-image http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2429934/is-it-possible-to...

based2 10y ago

https://www.adobe.com/uk/epaper/tips/acr5reflow/ https://www.adobe.com/uk/epaper/tips/acr5reflow/ https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/4816 https://github.com/mozilla/pdf.js/issues/4816