3 ms·
It also very inefficient especially if you want things like images embedded in it. Its not like you can read text without the right program, its still binary,
by SigmundA 8y ago
It also very inefficient especially if you want things like images embedded in it.
Its not like you can read text without the right program, its still binary, there just happens to be a mostly agreed upon standard and a lot of programs that can decode that standard and render to screen.
PDF viewers are built into most browsers now and allows rich page perfect print ready results.
If I had it my way we would settle on a binary data serialization format, I don't care MsgPack, Protobuf, heck maybe even sqlite and then everyone could have a viewer to snoop around in it. You would still have to understand whats being encoded but you could always "view source" so to speak.
- bluedino 8y agoIt's plenty efficent. It's just a container for an image. It's really, really efficent if you use vector graphics.
- SigmundA 8y agoAre you talking about text? No base64 is not an efficient way to store raster images, neither is vector markup.
- pierrebai 8y agoPDF don't need to use base64. (nor base85). They can embed pure binary just fine. A PDF with a JPG is just a few more bytes than the raw JPG. Same for text. Text can be pure text,but for space saving, it usually will be deflate-compressed.
- SigmundA 8y agoRight so your talking about PDF and not text, I agree PDF are efficient as they are a binary format.