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That’s the problem. It was never meant as what it’s used for now. It’s bad for manuals, it’s bad for data, it’s bad for mobile devices, it’s bad for versioning.

That’s the problem. It was never meant as what it’s used for now. It’s bad for manuals, it’s bad for data, it’s bad for mobile devices, it’s bad for versioning. It’s only good for printing. But somehow it’s used for all of these.

disqard 7y ago
Good perspective... and it made me think of a parallel with Democracy. Could the atrocity that is pdf be the "least bad" way to do all of the above in one file format?
- maxxxxx 7y ago
  No. It’s the worst bad :). It’s only good for printing.
Spooky23 7y ago
Formatting matters in many cases, and PDF respects that better than any other common format. I have policy and legal documents from 2005 in PDF/A that can be rendered identically in 2019, and likely in 2105. That isn't the case for HTML, Word or almost any non-plaintext format. If for no other reason than the US Federal Courts require use of PDF, the format will exist and be somewhat vibrant for many decades to come. I can wholeheartedly will agree that Adobe Reader sucks, but the format solves lots of problems that are difficult to solve otherwise.
- ghostly_s 7y ago
  How exactly do you think your HTML files from 2005 would render differently today? Sure, your modern browser engine would probably make slightly different decisions with fonts and margins, but would that negatively impact the usability of a legal document, research paper, etc.? Meanwhile, you would have gotten things like robust search and real compatibility with mobile phones and e-readers for free. A heavily restricted subset of HTML to replace PDF as the 'archival' format would make the world so much better of a place.
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    Formatting is important — all of the arguments made in favor of HTML can be made for plaintext. If you don’t care about format and want to read the document 30, 50, 100 or more years ago, you should use text. Will HTML formatting on a 4K display will look the same as an 800x600 monitor? Will all of the ancient display elements display the same? Will IE4 specific artifacts display? Search works fine in PDF. Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations. Few webpages look or function identically on mobile.
    - ghostly_s 7y ago
      How is formatting important though? Semantic formatting, sure, but again, a 20-year-old HTML file still has that preserved. The em-perfect formatting inherent in PDF seems entirely purposeless unless you for some reason need to be able to reproduce a printed copy of the document exactly. Formulas are a special case, but the great majority of documents I see distributed in PDF would be more useful as HTML, and I don't buy the argument that it would risk archivability. At the end of the day, HTML is a plain-text format which is quite human-readable even if all the world's HTML renderers were somehow lost to the ages. The only use-case I can conceive for perfectly-reproducable layout if you are not a print publisher is in fields where it is convention to reference text by page+paragraph number; in those cases, the page number is actually semantic information so could quite trivially be encoded in the content of the document to maintain that referent. > Search works fine in PDF. Search works fine in PDFs that don't use hyphenation or which properly implement it, and when they don't it breaks silently in ways that are potentially disastrous. > Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations. And my point about mobile was you don't need to optimize for it. >Few webpages look or function identically on mobile. Again, it doesn't need to look identical. That is a falce requirement. There is no value in that. The only web pages that don't function on mobile are ones which have been optimized for desktop. We're not talking about general-purpose web pages here, we're talking about textual documents. This is not some hypothetical scenario, BTW. The UK has been using HTML over PDF for public-facing documents for a couple years now, it seems to be working out for them[1]. 1. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should...
rayiner 7y ago
It’s good for manuals, which often have complex formatting and layout that necessitates precise control. It’s not appreciably worse for mobile devices than the incredibly bloated HTML that you see nowadays. It’s completely orthogonal to versioning, and PDF diff tools are quite competent. It’s not only spectacular for printing, but completely unmatched for paper <-> digital round trips.

disqard 7y ago

Good perspective... and it made me think of a parallel with Democracy. Could the atrocity that is pdf be the "least bad" way to do all of the above in one file format?

maxxxxx 7y ago
No. It’s the worst bad :). It’s only good for printing.

Spooky23 7y ago

Formatting matters in many cases, and PDF respects that better than any other common format. I have policy and legal documents from 2005 in PDF/A that can be rendered identically in 2019, and likely in 2105. That isn't the case for HTML, Word or almost any non-plaintext format. If for no other reason than the US Federal Courts require use of PDF, the format will exist and be somewhat vibrant for many decades to come. I can wholeheartedly will agree that Adobe Reader sucks, but the format solves lots of problems that are difficult to solve otherwise.

ghostly_s 7y ago
How exactly do you think your HTML files from 2005 would render differently today? Sure, your modern browser engine would probably make slightly different decisions with fonts and margins, but would that negatively impact the usability of a legal document, research paper, etc.? Meanwhile, you would have gotten things like robust search and real compatibility with mobile phones and e-readers for free. A heavily restricted subset of HTML to replace PDF as the 'archival' format would make the world so much better of a place.
- Spooky23 7y ago
  Formatting is important — all of the arguments made in favor of HTML can be made for plaintext. If you don’t care about format and want to read the document 30, 50, 100 or more years ago, you should use text. Will HTML formatting on a 4K display will look the same as an 800x600 monitor? Will all of the ancient display elements display the same? Will IE4 specific artifacts display? Search works fine in PDF. Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations. Few webpages look or function identically on mobile.
  - ghostly_s 7y ago
    How is formatting important though? Semantic formatting, sure, but again, a 20-year-old HTML file still has that preserved. The em-perfect formatting inherent in PDF seems entirely purposeless unless you for some reason need to be able to reproduce a printed copy of the document exactly. Formulas are a special case, but the great majority of documents I see distributed in PDF would be more useful as HTML, and I don't buy the argument that it would risk archivability. At the end of the day, HTML is a plain-text format which is quite human-readable even if all the world's HTML renderers were somehow lost to the ages. The only use-case I can conceive for perfectly-reproducable layout if you are not a print publisher is in fields where it is convention to reference text by page+paragraph number; in those cases, the page number is actually semantic information so could quite trivially be encoded in the content of the document to maintain that referent. > Search works fine in PDF. Search works fine in PDFs that don't use hyphenation or which properly implement it, and when they don't it breaks silently in ways that are potentially disastrous. > Mobile is not optimal, but platforms optimized for mobile require different design considerations. And my point about mobile was you don't need to optimize for it. >Few webpages look or function identically on mobile. Again, it doesn't need to look identical. That is a falce requirement. There is no value in that. The only web pages that don't function on mobile are ones which have been optimized for desktop. We're not talking about general-purpose web pages here, we're talking about textual documents. This is not some hypothetical scenario, BTW. The UK has been using HTML over PDF for public-facing documents for a couple years now, it seems to be working out for them[1]. 1. https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should...

rayiner 7y ago

It’s good for manuals, which often have complex formatting and layout that necessitates precise control. It’s not appreciably worse for mobile devices than the incredibly bloated HTML that you see nowadays. It’s completely orthogonal to versioning, and PDF diff tools are quite competent. It’s not only spectacular for printing, but completely unmatched for paper <-> digital round trips.