4 ms·

I see a lot of complaints about the PDF format here, what's the alternative though? Is there another format that achieves the same goals which people should ral

I see a lot of complaints about the PDF format here, what's the alternative though? Is there another format that achieves the same goals which people should rally around? Just curious given PDF's ubiquity. (For the record, I had to deal with text encodings in PDFs, and yes, it was a pain)

meruru 8y ago
Yes, DjVu: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
bsaul 8y ago
Pdf needs to have a « v2 » format that simply drops backward compatibility for everything that predates utf8, then create open converters tools to this new format. Only support one type of font embedding, with a single encoding (make everything utf-8) : it won’t change anything noticeable regarding the file size, and will greatly help at least parsing text. I’ve only dealt with text parsing, so that’s the only easy improvement i see, but i’m pretty sure following the same logic on graphic content should be possible.
- fulafel 8y ago
  There's PDF/A.
  - bsaul 8y ago
    Thanks for the info, i've never heard of that, that's very refreshing to see that people are indeed trying to update the standard to remove the cruft. Sidenote : It seems the PDF/A format open yet the specification is kept behind a paywall ????
statingobvious8 8y ago
Basic HTML5 with inline CSS and imgs written via data uri? Browsers are just as ubiquitous as pdf readers.