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One thing I find terrible about PDFs is when organisations embed useful data in them, in tables or graphs. Usually in the context of an annual report, or study,

One thing I find terrible about PDFs is when organisations embed useful data in them, in tables or graphs. Usually in the context of an annual report, or study, or some sort of policy document. They look great printed on paper, but not very transferrable. I know there is software [1] out there that tries to parse tables out of PDF documents, but from my experience you'll still end up doing manual adjustments afterwards to correct what the parser could not infer. That's the main reason why I support this motion. At least make the data both PDF + HTML, so you have options. [1] https://tabula.technology/ https://tabula.technology/

nv-vn 8y ago
For data in general, I don't think either HTML or PDF is perfect. Both are designed for you to lay out how a document is displayed, rather than the content specifically. For example, some content in HTML is invisible or split between different divs/spans/whatevers. A lot of it is generated dynamically by JavaScript and async requests. Something like JSON or XML is much more powerful for data storage. For example, you can store the data for graphs as raw data so that the consumer can render the graph however it wants. Display-agnostic data is always more flexible, and I think the best way to provide data on a webpage is both as a visual version and as raw data.