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Well, the idea behind PDF is good, just revamping the format will help a lot - remove the unnecessary features, ambiguities, remove old and legacy features, etc
by xvilka 7y ago
Well, the idea behind PDF is good, just revamping the format will help a lot - remove the unnecessary features, ambiguities, remove old and legacy features, etc.
- klodolph 7y agoI'm not sure that is so necessary. PDF is kind of a cleaned-up version of PostScript to begin with. Which features or ambiguities would you remove?
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoIf you were starting from scratch it would look quite different, the obvious change would be Unicode only. In fact it would probably look much like XPS.
- klodolph 7y agoIsn’t the main problem with XPS just software support, though?
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoThat's huge though, you need to know you will be able to open your documents in a decade or more.
- klodolph 7y agoI don’t understand your position at all. If you want to open your documents in a decade or more, redesigning a “cleaner” PDF would only make that less likely. If you want something cleaner than PDF, then XPS is already here. I don’t understand what scenario we’d have where designing a completely new format would give us better software support. So, the reason I’d see for designing a new format is if neither XPS nor PDF are good enough for some application.
- tonyedgecombe 7y agoI don't think there is a solution, PDF is with us for the foreseeable future. That doesn't mean I like it as a format or can't point out the problems with it.
- bscphil 7y agoIf what you want is "PDF the way it should be", we already have that, it's PDF/A. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
- xvilka 7y agoWith PDF 2.0 and corresponding PDF/A 4 they did steps in the right direction, but there are still droves of unnecessary and ambiguous features.