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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 present

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.
    - deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    - jjohansson 7y ago
      Didn’t archive.org at some point say they would ignore robots.txt? I wish they would.
  - ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
    CTRL-S might download 10's of files and folders just to save one webpage. And then the html page when opened, starts running scripts and calling home, it's a mess really.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
  Yeah, now that nearly everything prints or saves to pdf format, I have little use for a direct editor. Just make sure my PDF's always open and always look the same. What I would like, is to make PDF's easy to markup with highlighting, circles, comments etc. Currently, even in Acrobat, it's not very intuitive.
  - scarejunba 7y ago
    Interesting. I recall saving as MHTML when I was young but it looks like that's not a thing now.
    - yeahtruck 7y ago
      Internet explorer 5.5, or whatever, supported mhtml flawlessly, but then, Mozilla, or Netscape, it was called, didn't. So unless you're on ie 5.5 for life you're skits out of luck. Mhtml was flawless afaik but nothing else than ie 5.5 or whatever supported it. Mozilla which was Netscape sure did not. mhtml was the best thing. Except whenever using anything but ie 5.5 that is/was.
  - adrianN 7y ago
    On the mac I found Skim to be pretty good for annotating PDFs
  - rusk 7y ago
    I find "Preview", standard PDF viewer for the Mac to be pretty good for annotations. I "think" it might be available under acrobat for windows but it's a bit more obscure. Certainly, between me a mac user, and colleague using Linux I was able to provide feedback on their documentation in this way ...
- lawry 7y ago
  You might want to take a look at the singleFile chrome/firefox extension. It essentially combines all images, scripts, css into one html file that can be opened offline. As a bonus you can edit the html page with the inspector to hide irrelevant parts and it will save it in that state.
  - LordDragonfang 7y ago
    How is that different than mhtml, which is already the default file type for ctrl-s on Chrome?
    - Asooka 7y ago
      MHtml doesn't execute javascript, see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=452901 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=452901 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=330663 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=330663
- alpaca128 7y ago
  Also, presentations. It's pretty calming to know that every slide will look as intended, without anything misplaced or missing.
  - Nemo_bis 7y ago
    Unlikely to be true unless you use PDF/A.
    - jjohansson 7y ago
      Even with PDF/A, rendering fidelity is greatly impacted by the viewing software. Especially if that viewer is based on open source, where only a fraction of the PDF spec is implemented.
- efls 7y ago
  I tend to save a lot of online articles I want to read as PDFs, but found that on many "modern" sites printing as PDF only saves the first page. What's your work process? Do you run into similar problems?
taneq 7y ago
Exactly. Even if it's now fairly easy to edit a PDF (although the obvious approaches like opening them in Word still often visibly mess with the formatting), sending something as a PDF is a signal to the recipient that it's not meant to be changed.

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.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - jjohansson 7y ago
    Didn’t archive.org at some point say they would ignore robots.txt? I wish they would.
- ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
  CTRL-S might download 10's of files and folders just to save one webpage. And then the html page when opened, starts running scripts and calling home, it's a mess really.
ropiwqefjnpoa 7y ago
Yeah, now that nearly everything prints or saves to pdf format, I have little use for a direct editor. Just make sure my PDF's always open and always look the same. What I would like, is to make PDF's easy to markup with highlighting, circles, comments etc. Currently, even in Acrobat, it's not very intuitive.
- scarejunba 7y ago
  Interesting. I recall saving as MHTML when I was young but it looks like that's not a thing now.
  - yeahtruck 7y ago
    Internet explorer 5.5, or whatever, supported mhtml flawlessly, but then, Mozilla, or Netscape, it was called, didn't. So unless you're on ie 5.5 for life you're skits out of luck. Mhtml was flawless afaik but nothing else than ie 5.5 or whatever supported it. Mozilla which was Netscape sure did not. mhtml was the best thing. Except whenever using anything but ie 5.5 that is/was.
- adrianN 7y ago
  On the mac I found Skim to be pretty good for annotating PDFs
- rusk 7y ago
  I find "Preview", standard PDF viewer for the Mac to be pretty good for annotations. I "think" it might be available under acrobat for windows but it's a bit more obscure. Certainly, between me a mac user, and colleague using Linux I was able to provide feedback on their documentation in this way ...
lawry 7y ago
You might want to take a look at the singleFile chrome/firefox extension. It essentially combines all images, scripts, css into one html file that can be opened offline. As a bonus you can edit the html page with the inspector to hide irrelevant parts and it will save it in that state.
- LordDragonfang 7y ago
  How is that different than mhtml, which is already the default file type for ctrl-s on Chrome?
  - Asooka 7y ago
    MHtml doesn't execute javascript, see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=452901 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=452901 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=330663 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=330663
alpaca128 7y ago
Also, presentations. It's pretty calming to know that every slide will look as intended, without anything misplaced or missing.
- Nemo_bis 7y ago
  Unlikely to be true unless you use PDF/A.
  - jjohansson 7y ago
    Even with PDF/A, rendering fidelity is greatly impacted by the viewing software. Especially if that viewer is based on open source, where only a fraction of the PDF spec is implemented.
efls 7y ago
I tend to save a lot of online articles I want to read as PDFs, but found that on many "modern" sites printing as PDF only saves the first page. What's your work process? Do you run into similar problems?

taneq 7y ago

Exactly. Even if it's now fairly easy to edit a PDF (although the obvious approaches like opening them in Word still often visibly mess with the formatting), sending something as a PDF is a signal to the recipient that it's not meant to be changed.