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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 ex
by 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 agoI 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 agoWorse is better. http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html http://dreamsongs.com/RiseOfWorseIsBetter.html
- Spooky23 7y agoI’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.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoProblem is that PDF does not preserve content in a machine readable format. It’s a one way street. Once converted to PDF you can’t convert to another format without losing a lot of content and formatting.
- naniwaduni 7y agoThis is true of practically all formats.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoIt’s much truer for PDF than for other formats. The only format I could think of that’s worse would be plain images.
- e1ven 7y agoThat's exactly what I like about it. My ideal PDF is essentially a PNG file with selectable/searchable text. It's a great WORM format. Every added feature makes it worse.
- jolmg 7y agoWhy is it desireable for it to not be machine readable? What could possibly be the advantage in that?
- e1ven 7y agoBecause I don't want anything to try to reflow the text, or adjust the kerning, or modify to use system fonts. There are great systems for those already. When I want a PDF, it's because I want a format that I know is always going to look the same. A PDF is a great archive format. It's perfect for a scan of a document, or a printout. I never want my viewer to add anything to it, I never want it to detect anything, I never want it to adjust anything. Just render it exactly the same way, every time.
- jolmg 7y agoOne thing doesn't imply the other. The format could be machine readable and still be pixel-perfect consistent. It could also allow reflowing, adjusting the kerning, or use system fonts even if it's machine unreadable.
- 7y ago
- kick 7y agodjvu will continue to be a better format in every conceivable way long into the future.
- Ididntdothis 7y ago“printing documents consistently and with selectable text” It’s fine for that purpose but it’s terrible for eBooks, manuals, science papers and a lot of other stuff it’s used for. Some HTML with everything in one file would be much better in my opinion. Something like CHM maybe which MS used to use for help files.
- applecrazy 7y ago> some HTML with everything in one file You just described the ePub format. It’s a ZIP file with HTML docs in it.
- Ididntdothis 7y agoI didn’t know that but ePub is great for ebooks and manuals.
- mcswell 7y agoWe've printed several grammars of languages south Asia from PDFs, and we've also used the PDFs in the absence of the printed grammars. Some of these languages use the Arabic script, generally the nasta'liq version. The Arabic language usually uses the naskh version of the Arabic script, and it can be represented reasonably well with any of a variety of fonts. But nasta'liq is a different beast, and until very recently typesetting it was virtually impossible. (Urdu newspapers were hand written by calligraphers, and reproduced using photo-offset, well past the milenium.) There are now reasonably good nasta'liq fonts (SIL offers a good one), which we used to produce our PDFs (and then embedded the font in the PDF for portability). You still won't get good nasta'liq in HTML unless you happen to have the right rendering engine + the right font. In short, I don't think we could have typeset these grammars without PDF. We also did a grammar of Dhivehi, which is the only language in the world that uses the Thaana script. Thaana can be typeset quite easily--if you happen to have the right font. Most people don't. I guess the same thing holds if you happen to be publishing grammars of languages that used cuneiform--not many computer systems have cuneiform fonts!
- NieDzejkob 7y ago
- microcolonel 7y agoThe claim that text is selectable in PDFs is often dubious.
- jolmg 7y agoWell, I meant that the format supports it. I merely mentioned it so nobody would reply with something like PNG.
- klodolph 7y agoThe problem is that text selection relies on the PDF generation to be done in some kind of sensible fashion. There are so many ways to generate PDFs, and in some of them, the actual text is mangled or its order is mangled before it gets to the PDF generation step itself. But in general, if you generate the PDF with an authoring tool like LaTeX or InDesign, or if you print to PDF from a webpage or document, it's going to be selectable in a sensible way.
- abrookewood 7y agoNot sure about other apps, but the paid reader I use (1) includes an OCR function that adds a text layer to the document. Seems to work pretty well. (1) https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor https://www.tracker-software.com/product/pdf-xchange-editor