15 ms·

The Editable PDF Initiative

152 points by ddb 7y ago

jstewartmobile 7y ago
This is a mistake. The hard-to-edit, assembly-language-like nature of PDF is a feature, not a bug.
- smacktoward 7y ago
  The FAQ addresses this objection: https://editablepdf.org/faq/ https://editablepdf.org/faq/
  - chrismorgan 7y ago
    Yet this perception and the fact that it’s difficult does discourage editing. It’s kinda like security by obscurity: it’s not “real” security, but it does work, for the most part.
  - jimueller 7y ago
    The FAQ doesn't address it completely in my opinion. > Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your PDFs have not been tampered with. That's not really the point that it can't be edited, the value to me is that the sender has confidence that it will look the same to the receiver as the sender.
    - pacaro 7y ago
      And then of course there is the deliberately edit hostile way that PDFs can be (ab)used, by printing a document and then scanning it to PDF. In my experience some lawyers like this because it means that to suggest edits you have to retype or OCR entire paragraphs
      - kccqzy 7y ago
        I used to do a variation of this by converting all text to outlines in a PDF. It will even deter more people from editing the document. This also saves paper, and text will remain sharp (although slightly different because operating systems have different heuristics when it comes to rasterizing text and graphics).
    - dragonwriter 7y ago
      > That's not really the point that it can't be edited, the value to me is that the sender has confidence that it will look the same to the receiver as the sender. Different PDF reader software, and even sometimes the same reader software installed in different environments, can render PDFs, especially those containing any text differently. If you want confidence that it will appear the same, pure image formats are a safer bet.
  - roenxi 7y ago
    The FAQ addressing an objection doesn't mean that the objection is overcome. If I send you a PDF the point is that I don't want you to edit it. Otherwise I would have sent a docx file. An 'editable PDF' may as well get lumped in to the OpenDocument standard. It is already universally editable and I'm sure it has support for adding application-specific metadata. Having a PDF editor isn't some violation of sacred principles; but making changes to the standard to make it easy to edit is not improving the situation. I want to send a format that is hard to edit.
  - gpvos 7y ago
    I'd say https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ to that.
Ididntdothis 7y ago
I would prefer a “kill PDF” initiative :). PDF is a terrible format for almost all purposes it’s used for. It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes, is hard to parse and loses a ton of information from source documents. I don’t think we could have picked a much worse file format for widespread use.
- jolmg 7y ago
  What's a better format for displaying and printing documents consistently and with selectable text? > It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes That is a feature. I expect my PDFs to display with pixel-perfect consistency everywhere. There are other formats that adapt to screen sizes. HTML is good for that, if we ignore how people break that with styling.
  - happytoexplain 7y ago
    I would argue that PDF is nightmarishly bad - truly one of the worst formats ever created on almost all fronts - but it's the best and most featured option for its use case. Depressingly, I find this is true about a lot of things. I don't know what the answer is.
    - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
      Worse is better. http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
    - Spooky23 7y ago
      I’ve met a few people who feel passionately the way you do, and don’t get it. I worked with archivists on a few projects and never appreciated the dumpster fire that electronic documents presented. PDF is an amazing thing as you get an expressive format that preserves look, feel and content and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Just the fact that the US Federal courts standardized on PDF for most filings will ensure that it is a viable format for decades or more.
campfireveteran 7y ago
At first, I thought it said edible PDF, but I didn't think a closed format would taste very good.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
I'm not going to say the PDF format is perfect, but I do like sending out documents knowing that in general they are going to be opened by a reader in a presentation format. I'd rather they not be opened by an editor, where my viewers are immediately invited to start making changes like a word doc. I suppose having them open initially in a non-editable mode would work, Acrobat functions that way.
- klodolph 7y ago
  It’s phenomenal for so many use cases it’s absurd. I have a huge stash of PDF files—tons of articles that I’ve saved so I can refer to them later. Meanwhile, half the links I have to blog posts are dead, if not more. I know that I’ll be able to read these PDFs 10 years from now, or 20 years from now. Plenty of them are 10 or 20 years old. PDF is great for: - Archiving. It’s self-contained and will work 20 years down the line. - Math. Anything with equations. - Printing. I’ve tried various techniques to archive web pages with varying degrees of success. With PDFs I don’t need to think about it.
  - kick 7y ago
    Why not just archive.org or CTRL-S?
    - klodolph 7y ago
      - archive.org - lots of stuff was never archived, or is not available due to /robots.txt - ctrl-S - not self-contained, compatibility depends on which browser you use (Safari at least gets it right and puts it in a single file, but then other browsers can't open it. Firefox usually saves it correctly and portably, but now you have multiple files, and you can't rename them because they have references to each other, which makes it hard to organize. Then there's all the JavaScript that web pages sometimes have, which can break in the archive.) If a PDF is available it's easily better than these alternatives. In general I save webpages I really want to refer to later by copy-pasting the text out and manually reformatting as Markdown, or sometimes with wget.
BEEdwards 7y ago
I think it's funny that the top two comments of this post are diametrically opposed, yet I kind of agree with both of them. The PDF is a terrible format, yet if I'm sending an email with an attachment I want you to see exactly how it looks on my computer then I'm exporting to PDF. However if your book is only available as a pdf I'm probably going to skip it. PDF is good for short things, a contract maybe. The best use case is forms which this doesn't really talk about but seems to address, the web has basically solved it, but there are times you want to send people a form to fill out that you don't want the formatting to be go wacky on, but still need to be editable. PDF can do this but isn't good at it, this seems to take that not good and make it good.
- enriquto 7y ago
  > However if your book is only available as a pdf I'm probably going to skip it. Wait, what format do you expext a book to be? I mostly skip any book that is not on pdf
  - Terretta 7y ago
    Something that reflows when you change text size, font family, or page orientation.
    - enriquto 7y ago
      I am not sure that we can call a text that has not yet been typeset a "book". In any case, do you know any such format that does not completely botch equations? The closest I can imagine is html with mathjax.
      - aurbano 7y ago
        eBook formats can do that, but they may struggle with math notation - I haven't read any mathematical work on ebooks.
        enriquto 7y ago
kccqzy 7y ago
Meh. Not being easily editable is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes you want to send out a finalized document and want to make 99% of the users unable to edit them. That's what PDFs are for. Imagine lawyers needing to send out a finalized contract. Or a graphic designer sending out the finalized design. Or an electronic book that has gone through the work of the author, the editor, and the publisher and needs no more changes. PDFs give an air of permanency and stability when so many other digital formats are malleable.
- chungy 7y ago
  Agreed, 100%. Literally the only reason I make and send out PDFs is because they're effectively read-only. (It's not really perfectly so, but nobody should claim it's a tamper-proof document...)
  - dvdkon 7y ago
    So if you didn't care about the recipient editing the document, you'd send what format? Pretty much anyone can view a PDF and see it as intended, not so much with DOC, DOCX, ODT, INDD...
- klint 7y ago
  That objection, and others, are addressed in the project FAQ[1]. It's already possible to open and edit a PDF in various applications. [1] https://editablepdf.org/faq/ https://editablepdf.org/faq/ >But isn’t the whole point of PDF that you can’t edit it? No. The fact that standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident than a feature, as PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form documents needed to be transmitted. Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your PDFs have not been tampered with. More extensive edits, however, are more difficult, as they require the document’s logical structure to be automatically detected, and this is an error-prone task. [...] >Are you sure we need such a editable PDF format? I believe one of the most important benefits of PDF is its concrete, solid state. The idea of Editable PDF stems from a real-world need to improve the efficiency in the way that we work with documents. Today, the only editable file formats are those native to the applications that generated documents, and none of these formats guarantees the layout to be preserved in the same way as PDF. Furthermore, despite improvements in compatibility, using a native file format still often requires the recipient to be using the same software (and often the same version) of the application, which may not be available. PDF’s largest asset, its rock-solid visual presentation, will remain, and editable PDFs will be backwardly compatible with the current installed base of PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader and Preview.
9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago
I'm going to add an unsolicited plug for PDFEscape, which effectively lets you "edit" any PDF: https://www.pdfescape.com/ https://www.pdfescape.com/ It's an online service that lets you upload PDFs, then edit fields, add text, upload and paste images like your signature, etc. Perfect for filling out tedious paper application forms without having to deal with printing & scanning. I have no connection other than as a satisfied user, and in fact I have no idea how they make money, since the free mode features suffice for every use case I've had.
- calvinmorrison 7y ago
  SO to apples PDF veiwer. I don't own a Mac but I use my coworkers. Take a paper write your signature, then the webcam will scan, de crust and add your signature on a doc!
- scrollaway 7y ago
  I use Master PDF Editor (https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/ https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/). It's not free, but it's not terribly expensive either and you can probably get it expensed depending on your job. It also does PDF editing perfectly. I really hope there will be some open source version of it at some point. Or that someone's working on one.
mung 7y ago
If you find PDF painful because you can't reflow text or edit it, newsflash: you are using the wrong format. Industries that use PDF extensively: legal and printing. Neither of them want to be able to change documents. To preempt: I work within printing, yes there are tools to hack into PDFs and make certain alterations or fixes, but it's to get you out of a bind only, it's not a normal healthy workflow.
burtonator 7y ago
The fact that PDF is immutable is a huge advantage. In Polar we have taken the perspective that immutability is an advantage and is going to be the basis for our group collaboration around documents. We ended up building out annotations on top of PDF including text highlights and area highlights which can then be commented on: https://getpolarized.io/docs/annotation-sidebar.html https://getpolarized.io/docs/annotation-sidebar.html Some of our users keep asking for editable documentation and I think the main win here could just be using markdown which I'm thinking about adding. The biggest thing that's needed though, for scientific use, is latex. Fortunately, there are plenty of markdown implementations with latex support. PDF is amazingly good for printing documents but honestly 90% of the complex printing requirements aren't needed for regular use.
tingletech 7y ago
2018
diegof79 7y ago
Adobe Illustrator files (.ai) are PDF compatible files, so you can view them with a PDF reader like preview. The file still contains all the data to be edited in AI. I guess it means that PDF format is already designed to hold extra data that can be used for editing. But since pdf has many use cases, I don’t think that it will change much for editing. You still need a tool compatible with the original editor. However it will be interesting if docx like ai files could be displayed in a pdf viewer, it will save a lot of time dedicated to export/save as pdf.
piadodjanho 7y ago
The PDF file format is anachronous. When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user. Also, the file was made with the assumption it was suppose to be printed, not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the data. A funny trivia. The PDF is suppose to be read from the end of file. That's why some documents need to fully downloaded before they can display the first page. Of course, nowadays most PDF are linearized and load, at least, the first page right away. Over the years specification got so complex it became very hard to implement a minimal editor, viewer, parser or generator. If the format was simpler, it would be possible to make "save as PDF" more accessible. I've other issues with the typesetting and the way color is handled (it has a printer first approach), but I think this post got too long already. I just want to point out the spec supports so many pointless features such drawing in 3D space, movies, audio, HTML support, etc. Finally, I don't understand why most people are against a revision on the PDF format despite clearly having very little knowledge on how it works. I think multi person edition of the same entry with some version control can be useful. By the way, the format kinda let many people edit the document at once, as long as they are not working in the same part.
- kccqzy 7y ago
  > When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user. That's a good decision. Make the file format versatile and powerful. Don't constrain it by the limitations of contemporary hardware. > Also, the file was made with the assumption it was supposed to be printed, not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the data. I agree it's made with the assumption of being printed, but that's part of the appeal—preserving visual fidelity of how the document looks. You can't send people a docx and expect them to see the exact same thing on their screen down to every detail. And no it's not difficult to remove data. If you know exactly what to remove, it is quite easy to remove things. To remove text, find the Tj or TJ operators, remove them and their arguments. To remove an image, find the Do operator (occasionally BI, ID, EI) and remove it. You might have to perform decompression before doing that. For images, you might have to run another pass to delete the referenced object. But all these are all very easily automated. > Over the years specification got so complex it became very hard to implement a minimal editor, viewer, parser or generator. If the format was simpler, it would be possible to make "save as PDF" more accessible. The reason "save to PDF" is difficult to implement from scratch is not because of its complicated specification. Indeed parsers are quite easy to write. The real reason "save to PDF" is difficult to implement is because PDF wants visual fidelity; that comes at the price of specifying where exactly text should be placed, all the way from how paragraphs are flowed to how kerning of the letter is to be handled. Most applications do not care about these details. Most developers hardly have any interest in understanding line-breaking algorithms or interpreting font files to produce the right offsets and glyphs (think ligatures). These things are, rightfully, way beyond the business domain of typical applications and beyond the knowledge of typical developers.
saudijews 7y ago
Isn't that because the files have been created by jews arabs, or all those other shits who write the wrong way? You know all those donkey enthusiasts aren't familiar with the left to right type of civilized systems. If your pdf is wrong, perhaps a jew or other primitive person has compiled it. You never know with these people.
VvR-Ox 7y ago
Wow this is an awesome idea! While editing PDFs on Linux for me was always connected with pain I also had no joy using a plain macos for this. While the preview app is able to do some things it cannot do others that matter. I wanted to copy some text just yesterday - while I could select and copy it I could not insert it as a text again in the same application. To have to use some extremely overpriced adobe product for sometimes doing tasks like this is overkill and really unnecessary. To all the people who like PDF because you cannot edit it like you want: This is the "obfuscation argument" because anyone who has the right tool or googles for 10 min. can somehow edit PDF - it is just a real pain to do so most of the time and the result may look like the patched overhead transparencies we saw back in school in the earlier days.
cm-t 7y ago
As far I know, LibreOffice ('Draw' if i remember well) allow you to graphically edit PDF (xourjal too, but not as rich as LibreOffice)
- dwheeler 7y ago
  LibreOffice does let you create editable PDFs. They do this with a very elegant solution, they embed the Open document format within the PDF. This takes very little additional space, because the Open document format is compressed. I think the LibreOffice Solution is quite elegant; Open document format is already a standard, we don't need to create another one. And most important, it works today, right now. It would be a lot of effort to create a document format with the kind of richness that PDF supports. I am dubious it would be worth it. I think most people do not need an editable PDF in the first place, so this is a minority problem. If you do want this, for most people there is already a working solution... just store Open document format within PDFs.
lawlessone 7y ago
I don't want to give recruiters the ability to edit my CV.
laurent123456 7y ago
> PDF has long become the de facto format for exchanging print-oriented documents on the Web, and for a good reason: it works, and reliably so! Perhaps it's that way because it's read-only? If PDF files had to be generated in such a way that they can later be edited, things would get a lot more complex and probably less reliable. Also it feels like it's the wrong way to go about it, because no matter what PDF editing will never be as powerful as a proper text editor. So it would be the wrong tool to collaborate on a document (because as soon as you want to do something more advanced with layout, images, etc. you probably can't). Maybe it's good if you want to quickly amend a contract before sending it, but then you need to remember that your .doc is no longer the latest version. Basically a PDF document shouldn't be the source of truth for document editing as that would lock you to the wrong format.
- pge 7y ago
  While this is mostly true, it should not be relied on. If the PDF is produced from a text document or report generator, then the text as well as the charts are easy to edit with any text editor (only requires decompressing the PDF first). Obviously different if the document is a scanned image, but just saving a Word doc into PDF does not make it a read-only file. The benefit of PDF is that it is (as the name suggests) portable, and one knows that the recipient will see exactly what was sent. With a Word or Powerpoint, formatting can show up different on different machines, fonts may not be available, etc.
  - pdpi 7y ago
    It's read-only in the same sense as a jpeg or an mp3 are read-only — it's a format designed for publishing, rather than editing, data.
    - hvidgaard 7y ago
      When you print a word document to PDF the actual text, placement, and fonts are all embedded in the pdf. It may have been designed for publishing, but it's pretty simple to edit text in it.
bloak 7y ago
It sounds like what they want is a bit like what you get with a word processor provided that everyone is using the same version of the same program on identical systems, so you don't have the current situation of the layout getting completely broken because different people have different fonts, different paper sizes, and so on. In which case it's an interesting idea, but they shouldn't call it "PDF". Although it's an interesting idea, I suspect it will never work in practice because word processing is just too complex. There are just too many complex features that people expect to have available. Different implementations will never be sufficiently compatible. Perhaps the solution is to bundle your document with a WebAssembly binary of a particular version of LibreOffice? OK, maybe you could separate the rendering functionality from the UI stuff, but it's hard to see how in practice you could get documents to be editable and rendered in the same way everywhere except by having everyone run the same binary to do the rendering, and there will inevitable be a hundred versions of that binary in use as new features get added.
superkuh 7y ago
> If anyone constructed a PDF, which was itself blank but, via embedded JavaScript, loaded parts of itself from a remote server, people would rightly balk and wonder what on earth the creator of this PDF was thinking — yet this is precisely the design of many “websites”. To put it simply, websites and webapps are not the same thing, nor should they be. Yet the conflation of a platform for hypertext and a platform for applications has confused thinking, and led developers with prodigious aptitude for JavaScript to mistakenly see mere websites of text as a like nail to their applications hammer. This quote was supposed to be an absurd hypothetical. But I guess we'll live to see it in reality.
lars-b2018 7y ago
PDF is great because of its ability to present a print oriented view of any type of information, packed in a document container in an efficient manner. This is the design goal of the format. It is the source application's responsibility to manage the semantics of the document scope, where edits to the represented information can potentially cascade across the document in non-trivial ways (think Excel for example). PDFs CAN be edited today, but those edits are made by tools that just change the visual layout vs. the information structures represented by the document. It's a rather difficult problem to overcome if the PDF format now must contain rules about the underlying information structure itself in order to maintain a consistent representation in the document.
nuclx 7y ago
That's like requesting that executables should include their source code.
runxel 7y ago
Is this some weird kind of satire I don't understand? Being read-only is the thing why we have PDF in the first place. If you want to do changes, go back to the program where it came from. It's simple as that! :)
- tom_mellior 7y ago
  I've often needed to fill in PDF forms that were not using PDF's fillable form fields, or to paste in a scanned signature. This is an important use case for PDFs, and the people who send you these forms expect you to have a printer, nice handwriting, and a scanner. Instead you can do the whole thing in software, with only standard Ubuntu packages, but it can be painful for multi-page documents: I typically have to use a sequence of pdfseparate/edit each page in isolation/pdfjoin.
  - lxgr 7y ago
    PDFs specifically support the form use case (I remember using this a few times for things like applying for credit cards etc). That was on Ubuntu too! Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and even fits the PDF model quite well.
    - tom_mellior 7y ago
      > PDFs specifically support the form use case Yes, but the person creating the PDF must know this, and must know how to do it with the software they have. In practice, many forms I've seen came out of situations where this was not the case. > Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and even fits the PDF model quite well. It's not a problem to open a one-page PDF in Inkscape or the Gimp and paste a signature in there. That's what I said. It gets tedious with multi-page PDFs. Do you have a better solution for this?
  - howard941 7y ago
    This is one area where Acrobat (The Full Version) shines. It has a typewriter mode allowing adding arbitrary text set in arbritary fonts to a preexisting .pdf as easily for a single page pdf as for a 100 page pdf.
okaleniuk 7y ago
I misread it as edible PDF and thought wow! technology sure went a long way! It would be nice to have an open standard for 3D food printing though.
IvanK_net 7y ago
I have been working on a PDF editor for several years. It is available inside my photo editor https://www.Photopea.com https://www.Photopea.com (press File - Open - choose a PDF file). People open 7 000 PDF files in it every day. Often, a PDF contains just a single raster bitmap with the whole content rasterized. Also, text is often converted to vector shapes, which also makes it non-editable (as text). But it can open / save PDFs from Google Docs and other editors quite well.
nxpnsv 7y ago
I prefer my PDF static, my meticulously edited LaTeX would be ruined by sticky fingers. However, something I much would like is better copy to clipboard from PDF. Non trivial input with tables and line breaks turns in to indecipherable alphabet soup...
- kccqzy 7y ago
  Check out https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accsupp https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accsupp which may be helpful. I've only used it a handful of times on small amounts of text though.
  - nxpnsv 7y ago
    Cool, I’ll try it out. although typically I only need to copy other researchers work.
specialist 7y ago
PDF forensics would be nice. I used to write print production software. I'm no stranger to PDF. I recently had to fill out a PDF form and send it back. It took me way too long to figure out the "form elements" were just images. I kept trying to use different clients, thinking the content creator must have used some poorly supported corner case of the PDF spec. So I printed the frikkin PDF, wrote on it, scanned it, and sent it back. What could be easier?
pdpi 7y ago
PDF is a publishing, rather than an editing format. It belongs in the same bucket as .mp3 and .jpg, rather than the .doc and .psd bucket. This is not about how easy or how hard it is to modify a pdf, it's about the intended purpose. The fact that it's meant for publishing means we get to optimise it as such, both in terms of simplicity of the format itself, and in terms of the tools that interact with it. This makes consistent-ish rendering much easier. The features that would enable the format to be "editable" are also the sort of features that make consistency hard.
- social_quotient 7y ago
  Totally agree here. It would be nice to edit pdf the same way it would be nice to edit a jpg. But it’s the wrong tier to operate on. What people really need is more consistent access to source files aka design files. The only time I feel stuck needing to change a pdf or jpg is when I don’t have access to the “design file”. If reports that come out of systems need to be edited they should dump to excel or word and not pdf. While the P in PDF means portable I think it’s better thought of as “published” as in “published document file”.
- blunte 7y ago
  Consistency can be solved with hashing and cryptographic signatures. The user story here is that PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users or users without sufficient technical skill. And since you reference mp3 and jpg, you surely know that both formats can be modified in ways that many people will not recognize as modifications. It just pushes the skill level up a bit. But there's always a technically capable person available for hire to modify one of the "permanent" formats you mention.
  - brokenmachine 7y ago
    >PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users Why is that a problem? I'm pretty sure there's a PDF reader app for every major platform.
    - 7y ago
aabbcc1241 7y ago
If you want consistent display and editable format, why not just use HTML with standard css? You also get enhanced accessibility. (I often need to reflow the pdf when reading from mobile device)
lxgr 7y ago
The proposed way to achieve editability sounds like it is inherently at odds with the page description model of PDF, which is in turn exactly what gives it its stable output on different platforms. A PDF renderer basically needs to be able to rasterize fonts and paint glyphs on a page/screen – that's it. Layout, spacing and even kerning are left to the producing application. The project mentions the lack of robustness inherent to web-based document formats, but I'm afraid that any alternative would either be severely limited in the range of achievable output documents or would end up reinventing the wheel. As an analogy: SVG has been around for a while, and yet we still use PNGs and I don't see them going away anytime soon. Maybe what we really need is just more widespread support of ePub, and maybe some extensions for more "document-like" (instead of book-like) functionality in editors for it, and potentially support for an embedded rendered PDF for layout stability?
Meph504 7y ago
I think this effort is misguided, they are attempting to take something that has a specific purpose and does it well, and subvert it into something that other applications and formats do well. Pdf's aren't promoted as a portable editable format, but a portable, sharable, and archival format. Why promote PDF over ODF? Is the issues of document reflow, of an editable document such an issue that they need to develop a new set of tools, and change the structure of PDF to resolve the issue, if that is the case, it seems they could contribute to resolving the issue in ODF?
Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
Switch to XPS; it's a very clean format, much easier to work with than PDF. And it's already supported by many apps, maybe not as widely as PDF, but pretty well.
Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago
Generally it's a very confusing initiative, very much like asking that text in screenshots could stay editable and buttons clickable. Why?

152 points by ddb 7y ago

jstewartmobile 7y ago

This is a mistake. The hard-to-edit, assembly-language-like nature of PDF is a feature, not a bug.

smacktoward 7y ago
The FAQ addresses this objection: https://editablepdf.org/faq/ https://editablepdf.org/faq/
- chrismorgan 7y ago
  Yet this perception and the fact that it’s difficult does discourage editing. It’s kinda like security by obscurity: it’s not “real” security, but it does work, for the most part.
- jimueller 7y ago
  The FAQ doesn't address it completely in my opinion. > Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your PDFs have not been tampered with. That's not really the point that it can't be edited, the value to me is that the sender has confidence that it will look the same to the receiver as the sender.
  - pacaro 7y ago
    And then of course there is the deliberately edit hostile way that PDFs can be (ab)used, by printing a document and then scanning it to PDF. In my experience some lawyers like this because it means that to suggest edits you have to retype or OCR entire paragraphs
    - kccqzy 7y ago
      I used to do a variation of this by converting all text to outlines in a PDF. It will even deter more people from editing the document. This also saves paper, and text will remain sharp (although slightly different because operating systems have different heuristics when it comes to rasterizing text and graphics).
  - dragonwriter 7y ago
    > That's not really the point that it can't be edited, the value to me is that the sender has confidence that it will look the same to the receiver as the sender. Different PDF reader software, and even sometimes the same reader software installed in different environments, can render PDFs, especially those containing any text differently. If you want confidence that it will appear the same, pure image formats are a safer bet.
- roenxi 7y ago
  The FAQ addressing an objection doesn't mean that the objection is overcome. If I send you a PDF the point is that I don't want you to edit it. Otherwise I would have sent a docx file. An 'editable PDF' may as well get lumped in to the OpenDocument standard. It is already universally editable and I'm sure it has support for adding application-specific metadata. Having a PDF editor isn't some violation of sacred principles; but making changes to the standard to make it easy to edit is not improving the situation. I want to send a format that is hard to edit.
- gpvos 7y ago
  I'd say https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ to that.

Ididntdothis 7y ago

I would prefer a “kill PDF” initiative :). PDF is a terrible format for almost all purposes it’s used for. It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes, is hard to parse and loses a ton of information from source documents. I don’t think we could have picked a much worse file format for widespread use.

jolmg 7y ago
What's a better format for displaying and printing documents consistently and with selectable text? > It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes That is a feature. I expect my PDFs to display with pixel-perfect consistency everywhere. There are other formats that adapt to screen sizes. HTML is good for that, if we ignore how people break that with styling.
- happytoexplain 7y ago
  I would argue that PDF is nightmarishly bad - truly one of the worst formats ever created on almost all fronts - but it's the best and most featured option for its use case. Depressingly, I find this is true about a lot of things. I don't know what the answer is.
  - segfaultbuserr 7y ago
    Worse is better. http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
  - Spooky23 7y ago
    I’ve met a few people who feel passionately the way you do, and don’t get it. I worked with archivists on a few projects and never appreciated the dumpster fire that electronic documents presented. PDF is an amazing thing as you get an expressive format that preserves look, feel and content and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Just the fact that the US Federal courts standardized on PDF for most filings will ensure that it is a viable format for decades or more.

campfireveteran 7y ago

At first, I thought it said edible PDF, but I didn't think a closed format would taste very good.

ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago

I'm not going to say the PDF format is perfect, but I do like sending out documents knowing that in general they are going to be opened by a reader in a presentation format. I'd rather they not be opened by an editor, where my viewers are immediately invited to start making changes like a word doc. I suppose having them open initially in a non-editable mode would work, Acrobat functions that way.

klodolph 7y ago
It’s phenomenal for so many use cases it’s absurd. I have a huge stash of PDF files—tons of articles that I’ve saved so I can refer to them later. Meanwhile, half the links I have to blog posts are dead, if not more. I know that I’ll be able to read these PDFs 10 years from now, or 20 years from now. Plenty of them are 10 or 20 years old. PDF is great for: - Archiving. It’s self-contained and will work 20 years down the line. - Math. Anything with equations. - Printing. I’ve tried various techniques to archive web pages with varying degrees of success. With PDFs I don’t need to think about it.
- kick 7y ago
  Why not just archive.org or CTRL-S?
  - klodolph 7y ago
    - archive.org - lots of stuff was never archived, or is not available due to /robots.txt - ctrl-S - not self-contained, compatibility depends on which browser you use (Safari at least gets it right and puts it in a single file, but then other browsers can't open it. Firefox usually saves it correctly and portably, but now you have multiple files, and you can't rename them because they have references to each other, which makes it hard to organize. Then there's all the JavaScript that web pages sometimes have, which can break in the archive.) If a PDF is available it's easily better than these alternatives. In general I save webpages I really want to refer to later by copy-pasting the text out and manually reformatting as Markdown, or sometimes with wget.

BEEdwards 7y ago

I think it's funny that the top two comments of this post are diametrically opposed, yet I kind of agree with both of them. The PDF is a terrible format, yet if I'm sending an email with an attachment I want you to see exactly how it looks on my computer then I'm exporting to PDF. However if your book is only available as a pdf I'm probably going to skip it. PDF is good for short things, a contract maybe. The best use case is forms which this doesn't really talk about but seems to address, the web has basically solved it, but there are times you want to send people a form to fill out that you don't want the formatting to be go wacky on, but still need to be editable. PDF can do this but isn't good at it, this seems to take that not good and make it good.

enriquto 7y ago
> However if your book is only available as a pdf I'm probably going to skip it. Wait, what format do you expext a book to be? I mostly skip any book that is not on pdf
- Terretta 7y ago
  Something that reflows when you change text size, font family, or page orientation.
  - enriquto 7y ago
    I am not sure that we can call a text that has not yet been typeset a "book". In any case, do you know any such format that does not completely botch equations? The closest I can imagine is html with mathjax.
    - aurbano 7y ago
      eBook formats can do that, but they may struggle with math notation - I haven't read any mathematical work on ebooks.
      - enriquto 7y ago

kccqzy 7y ago

Meh. Not being easily editable is a feature, not a bug. Sometimes you want to send out a finalized document and want to make 99% of the users unable to edit them. That's what PDFs are for. Imagine lawyers needing to send out a finalized contract. Or a graphic designer sending out the finalized design. Or an electronic book that has gone through the work of the author, the editor, and the publisher and needs no more changes. PDFs give an air of permanency and stability when so many other digital formats are malleable.

chungy 7y ago
Agreed, 100%. Literally the only reason I make and send out PDFs is because they're effectively read-only. (It's not really perfectly so, but nobody should claim it's a tamper-proof document...)
- dvdkon 7y ago
  So if you didn't care about the recipient editing the document, you'd send what format? Pretty much anyone can view a PDF and see it as intended, not so much with DOC, DOCX, ODT, INDD...
klint 7y ago
That objection, and others, are addressed in the project FAQ[1]. It's already possible to open and edit a PDF in various applications. [1] https://editablepdf.org/faq/ https://editablepdf.org/faq/ >But isn’t the whole point of PDF that you can’t edit it? No. The fact that standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident than a feature, as PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form documents needed to be transmitted. Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your PDFs have not been tampered with. More extensive edits, however, are more difficult, as they require the document’s logical structure to be automatically detected, and this is an error-prone task. [...] >Are you sure we need such a editable PDF format? I believe one of the most important benefits of PDF is its concrete, solid state. The idea of Editable PDF stems from a real-world need to improve the efficiency in the way that we work with documents. Today, the only editable file formats are those native to the applications that generated documents, and none of these formats guarantees the layout to be preserved in the same way as PDF. Furthermore, despite improvements in compatibility, using a native file format still often requires the recipient to be using the same software (and often the same version) of the application, which may not be available. PDF’s largest asset, its rock-solid visual presentation, will remain, and editable PDFs will be backwardly compatible with the current installed base of PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader and Preview.

9nGQluzmnq3M 7y ago

I'm going to add an unsolicited plug for PDFEscape, which effectively lets you "edit" any PDF: https://www.pdfescape.com/ https://www.pdfescape.com/ It's an online service that lets you upload PDFs, then edit fields, add text, upload and paste images like your signature, etc. Perfect for filling out tedious paper application forms without having to deal with printing & scanning. I have no connection other than as a satisfied user, and in fact I have no idea how they make money, since the free mode features suffice for every use case I've had.

calvinmorrison 7y ago
SO to apples PDF veiwer. I don't own a Mac but I use my coworkers. Take a paper write your signature, then the webcam will scan, de crust and add your signature on a doc!
scrollaway 7y ago
I use Master PDF Editor (https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/ https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/). It's not free, but it's not terribly expensive either and you can probably get it expensed depending on your job. It also does PDF editing perfectly. I really hope there will be some open source version of it at some point. Or that someone's working on one.

mung 7y ago

If you find PDF painful because you can't reflow text or edit it, newsflash: you are using the wrong format. Industries that use PDF extensively: legal and printing. Neither of them want to be able to change documents. To preempt: I work within printing, yes there are tools to hack into PDFs and make certain alterations or fixes, but it's to get you out of a bind only, it's not a normal healthy workflow.

burtonator 7y ago

The fact that PDF is immutable is a huge advantage. In Polar we have taken the perspective that immutability is an advantage and is going to be the basis for our group collaboration around documents. We ended up building out annotations on top of PDF including text highlights and area highlights which can then be commented on: https://getpolarized.io/docs/annotation-sidebar.html https://getpolarized.io/docs/annotation-sidebar.html Some of our users keep asking for editable documentation and I think the main win here could just be using markdown which I'm thinking about adding. The biggest thing that's needed though, for scientific use, is latex. Fortunately, there are plenty of markdown implementations with latex support. PDF is amazingly good for printing documents but honestly 90% of the complex printing requirements aren't needed for regular use.

tingletech 7y ago

2018

diegof79 7y ago

Adobe Illustrator files (.ai) are PDF compatible files, so you can view them with a PDF reader like preview. The file still contains all the data to be edited in AI. I guess it means that PDF format is already designed to hold extra data that can be used for editing. But since pdf has many use cases, I don’t think that it will change much for editing. You still need a tool compatible with the original editor. However it will be interesting if docx like ai files could be displayed in a pdf viewer, it will save a lot of time dedicated to export/save as pdf.

piadodjanho 7y ago

The PDF file format is anachronous. When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user. Also, the file was made with the assumption it was suppose to be printed, not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the data. A funny trivia. The PDF is suppose to be read from the end of file. That's why some documents need to fully downloaded before they can display the first page. Of course, nowadays most PDF are linearized and load, at least, the first page right away. Over the years specification got so complex it became very hard to implement a minimal editor, viewer, parser or generator. If the format was simpler, it would be possible to make "save as PDF" more accessible. I've other issues with the typesetting and the way color is handled (it has a printer first approach), but I think this post got too long already. I just want to point out the spec supports so many pointless features such drawing in 3D space, movies, audio, HTML support, etc. Finally, I don't understand why most people are against a revision on the PDF format despite clearly having very little knowledge on how it works. I think multi person edition of the same entry with some version control can be useful. By the way, the format kinda let many people edit the document at once, as long as they are not working in the same part.

kccqzy 7y ago
> When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user. That's a good decision. Make the file format versatile and powerful. Don't constrain it by the limitations of contemporary hardware. > Also, the file was made with the assumption it was supposed to be printed, not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the data. I agree it's made with the assumption of being printed, but that's part of the appeal—preserving visual fidelity of how the document looks. You can't send people a docx and expect them to see the exact same thing on their screen down to every detail. And no it's not difficult to remove data. If you know exactly what to remove, it is quite easy to remove things. To remove text, find the Tj or TJ operators, remove them and their arguments. To remove an image, find the Do operator (occasionally BI, ID, EI) and remove it. You might have to perform decompression before doing that. For images, you might have to run another pass to delete the referenced object. But all these are all very easily automated. > Over the years specification got so complex it became very hard to implement a minimal editor, viewer, parser or generator. If the format was simpler, it would be possible to make "save as PDF" more accessible. The reason "save to PDF" is difficult to implement from scratch is not because of its complicated specification. Indeed parsers are quite easy to write. The real reason "save to PDF" is difficult to implement is because PDF wants visual fidelity; that comes at the price of specifying where exactly text should be placed, all the way from how paragraphs are flowed to how kerning of the letter is to be handled. Most applications do not care about these details. Most developers hardly have any interest in understanding line-breaking algorithms or interpreting font files to produce the right offsets and glyphs (think ligatures). These things are, rightfully, way beyond the business domain of typical applications and beyond the knowledge of typical developers.

saudijews 7y ago

Isn't that because the files have been created by jews arabs, or all those other shits who write the wrong way? You know all those donkey enthusiasts aren't familiar with the left to right type of civilized systems. If your pdf is wrong, perhaps a jew or other primitive person has compiled it. You never know with these people.

VvR-Ox 7y ago

Wow this is an awesome idea! While editing PDFs on Linux for me was always connected with pain I also had no joy using a plain macos for this. While the preview app is able to do some things it cannot do others that matter. I wanted to copy some text just yesterday - while I could select and copy it I could not insert it as a text again in the same application. To have to use some extremely overpriced adobe product for sometimes doing tasks like this is overkill and really unnecessary. To all the people who like PDF because you cannot edit it like you want: This is the "obfuscation argument" because anyone who has the right tool or googles for 10 min. can somehow edit PDF - it is just a real pain to do so most of the time and the result may look like the patched overhead transparencies we saw back in school in the earlier days.

cm-t 7y ago

As far I know, LibreOffice ('Draw' if i remember well) allow you to graphically edit PDF (xourjal too, but not as rich as LibreOffice)

dwheeler 7y ago
LibreOffice does let you create editable PDFs. They do this with a very elegant solution, they embed the Open document format within the PDF. This takes very little additional space, because the Open document format is compressed. I think the LibreOffice Solution is quite elegant; Open document format is already a standard, we don't need to create another one. And most important, it works today, right now. It would be a lot of effort to create a document format with the kind of richness that PDF supports. I am dubious it would be worth it. I think most people do not need an editable PDF in the first place, so this is a minority problem. If you do want this, for most people there is already a working solution... just store Open document format within PDFs.

lawlessone 7y ago

I don't want to give recruiters the ability to edit my CV.

laurent123456 7y ago

> PDF has long become the de facto format for exchanging print-oriented documents on the Web, and for a good reason: it works, and reliably so! Perhaps it's that way because it's read-only? If PDF files had to be generated in such a way that they can later be edited, things would get a lot more complex and probably less reliable. Also it feels like it's the wrong way to go about it, because no matter what PDF editing will never be as powerful as a proper text editor. So it would be the wrong tool to collaborate on a document (because as soon as you want to do something more advanced with layout, images, etc. you probably can't). Maybe it's good if you want to quickly amend a contract before sending it, but then you need to remember that your .doc is no longer the latest version. Basically a PDF document shouldn't be the source of truth for document editing as that would lock you to the wrong format.

pge 7y ago
While this is mostly true, it should not be relied on. If the PDF is produced from a text document or report generator, then the text as well as the charts are easy to edit with any text editor (only requires decompressing the PDF first). Obviously different if the document is a scanned image, but just saving a Word doc into PDF does not make it a read-only file. The benefit of PDF is that it is (as the name suggests) portable, and one knows that the recipient will see exactly what was sent. With a Word or Powerpoint, formatting can show up different on different machines, fonts may not be available, etc.
- pdpi 7y ago
  It's read-only in the same sense as a jpeg or an mp3 are read-only — it's a format designed for publishing, rather than editing, data.
  - hvidgaard 7y ago
    When you print a word document to PDF the actual text, placement, and fonts are all embedded in the pdf. It may have been designed for publishing, but it's pretty simple to edit text in it.

bloak 7y ago

It sounds like what they want is a bit like what you get with a word processor provided that everyone is using the same version of the same program on identical systems, so you don't have the current situation of the layout getting completely broken because different people have different fonts, different paper sizes, and so on. In which case it's an interesting idea, but they shouldn't call it "PDF". Although it's an interesting idea, I suspect it will never work in practice because word processing is just too complex. There are just too many complex features that people expect to have available. Different implementations will never be sufficiently compatible. Perhaps the solution is to bundle your document with a WebAssembly binary of a particular version of LibreOffice? OK, maybe you could separate the rendering functionality from the UI stuff, but it's hard to see how in practice you could get documents to be editable and rendered in the same way everywhere except by having everyone run the same binary to do the rendering, and there will inevitable be a hundred versions of that binary in use as new features get added.

superkuh 7y ago

> If anyone constructed a PDF, which was itself blank but, via embedded JavaScript, loaded parts of itself from a remote server, people would rightly balk and wonder what on earth the creator of this PDF was thinking — yet this is precisely the design of many “websites”. To put it simply, websites and webapps are not the same thing, nor should they be. Yet the conflation of a platform for hypertext and a platform for applications has confused thinking, and led developers with prodigious aptitude for JavaScript to mistakenly see mere websites of text as a like nail to their applications hammer. This quote was supposed to be an absurd hypothetical. But I guess we'll live to see it in reality.

lars-b2018 7y ago

PDF is great because of its ability to present a print oriented view of any type of information, packed in a document container in an efficient manner. This is the design goal of the format. It is the source application's responsibility to manage the semantics of the document scope, where edits to the represented information can potentially cascade across the document in non-trivial ways (think Excel for example). PDFs CAN be edited today, but those edits are made by tools that just change the visual layout vs. the information structures represented by the document. It's a rather difficult problem to overcome if the PDF format now must contain rules about the underlying information structure itself in order to maintain a consistent representation in the document.

nuclx 7y ago

That's like requesting that executables should include their source code.

runxel 7y ago

Is this some weird kind of satire I don't understand? Being read-only is the thing why we have PDF in the first place. If you want to do changes, go back to the program where it came from. It's simple as that! :)

tom_mellior 7y ago
I've often needed to fill in PDF forms that were not using PDF's fillable form fields, or to paste in a scanned signature. This is an important use case for PDFs, and the people who send you these forms expect you to have a printer, nice handwriting, and a scanner. Instead you can do the whole thing in software, with only standard Ubuntu packages, but it can be painful for multi-page documents: I typically have to use a sequence of pdfseparate/edit each page in isolation/pdfjoin.
- lxgr 7y ago
  PDFs specifically support the form use case (I remember using this a few times for things like applying for credit cards etc). That was on Ubuntu too! Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and even fits the PDF model quite well.
  - tom_mellior 7y ago
    > PDFs specifically support the form use case Yes, but the person creating the PDF must know this, and must know how to do it with the software they have. In practice, many forms I've seen came out of situations where this was not the case. > Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and even fits the PDF model quite well. It's not a problem to open a one-page PDF in Inkscape or the Gimp and paste a signature in there. That's what I said. It gets tedious with multi-page PDFs. Do you have a better solution for this?
- howard941 7y ago
  This is one area where Acrobat (The Full Version) shines. It has a typewriter mode allowing adding arbitrary text set in arbritary fonts to a preexisting .pdf as easily for a single page pdf as for a 100 page pdf.

okaleniuk 7y ago

I misread it as edible PDF and thought wow! technology sure went a long way! It would be nice to have an open standard for 3D food printing though.

IvanK_net 7y ago

I have been working on a PDF editor for several years. It is available inside my photo editor https://www.Photopea.com https://www.Photopea.com (press File - Open - choose a PDF file). People open 7 000 PDF files in it every day. Often, a PDF contains just a single raster bitmap with the whole content rasterized. Also, text is often converted to vector shapes, which also makes it non-editable (as text). But it can open / save PDFs from Google Docs and other editors quite well.

nxpnsv 7y ago

I prefer my PDF static, my meticulously edited LaTeX would be ruined by sticky fingers. However, something I much would like is better copy to clipboard from PDF. Non trivial input with tables and line breaks turns in to indecipherable alphabet soup...

kccqzy 7y ago
Check out https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accsupp https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accsupp which may be helpful. I've only used it a handful of times on small amounts of text though.
- nxpnsv 7y ago
  Cool, I’ll try it out. although typically I only need to copy other researchers work.

specialist 7y ago

PDF forensics would be nice. I used to write print production software. I'm no stranger to PDF. I recently had to fill out a PDF form and send it back. It took me way too long to figure out the "form elements" were just images. I kept trying to use different clients, thinking the content creator must have used some poorly supported corner case of the PDF spec. So I printed the frikkin PDF, wrote on it, scanned it, and sent it back. What could be easier?

pdpi 7y ago

PDF is a publishing, rather than an editing format. It belongs in the same bucket as .mp3 and .jpg, rather than the .doc and .psd bucket. This is not about how easy or how hard it is to modify a pdf, it's about the intended purpose. The fact that it's meant for publishing means we get to optimise it as such, both in terms of simplicity of the format itself, and in terms of the tools that interact with it. This makes consistent-ish rendering much easier. The features that would enable the format to be "editable" are also the sort of features that make consistency hard.

social_quotient 7y ago
Totally agree here. It would be nice to edit pdf the same way it would be nice to edit a jpg. But it’s the wrong tier to operate on. What people really need is more consistent access to source files aka design files. The only time I feel stuck needing to change a pdf or jpg is when I don’t have access to the “design file”. If reports that come out of systems need to be edited they should dump to excel or word and not pdf. While the P in PDF means portable I think it’s better thought of as “published” as in “published document file”.
blunte 7y ago
Consistency can be solved with hashing and cryptographic signatures. The user story here is that PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users or users without sufficient technical skill. And since you reference mp3 and jpg, you surely know that both formats can be modified in ways that many people will not recognize as modifications. It just pushes the skill level up a bit. But there's always a technically capable person available for hire to modify one of the "permanent" formats you mention.
- brokenmachine 7y ago
  >PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for non Mac users Why is that a problem? I'm pretty sure there's a PDF reader app for every major platform.
  - 7y ago

aabbcc1241 7y ago

If you want consistent display and editable format, why not just use HTML with standard css? You also get enhanced accessibility. (I often need to reflow the pdf when reading from mobile device)

lxgr 7y ago

The proposed way to achieve editability sounds like it is inherently at odds with the page description model of PDF, which is in turn exactly what gives it its stable output on different platforms. A PDF renderer basically needs to be able to rasterize fonts and paint glyphs on a page/screen – that's it. Layout, spacing and even kerning are left to the producing application. The project mentions the lack of robustness inherent to web-based document formats, but I'm afraid that any alternative would either be severely limited in the range of achievable output documents or would end up reinventing the wheel. As an analogy: SVG has been around for a while, and yet we still use PNGs and I don't see them going away anytime soon. Maybe what we really need is just more widespread support of ePub, and maybe some extensions for more "document-like" (instead of book-like) functionality in editors for it, and potentially support for an embedded rendered PDF for layout stability?

Meph504 7y ago

I think this effort is misguided, they are attempting to take something that has a specific purpose and does it well, and subvert it into something that other applications and formats do well. Pdf's aren't promoted as a portable editable format, but a portable, sharable, and archival format. Why promote PDF over ODF? Is the issues of document reflow, of an editable document such an issue that they need to develop a new set of tools, and change the structure of PDF to resolve the issue, if that is the case, it seems they could contribute to resolving the issue in ODF?

Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago

Switch to XPS; it's a very clean format, much easier to work with than PDF. And it's already supported by many apps, maybe not as widely as PDF, but pretty well.

Mikhail_Edoshin 7y ago

Generally it's a very confusing initiative, very much like asking that text in screenshots could stay editable and buttons clickable. Why?