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Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by defau
by formalsystem 6y ago
Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- ivan_ah 6y agoThis was posted on HN a while back and has some interesting bits of history and context: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pam43n/why-the-pdf-is-secretly-the-worlds-most-important-file-format https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/pam43n/why-the-pdf-is-sec... via https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19819789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19819789
- djrobstep 6y agoIf you think that's crazy, wait until you hear about HTML!
- emmelaich 6y agoYou laugh, but surely there is a case for standard of static html+css these days to do 95% of what pdf does. I don't think anyone is motivated enough to make that standard, however.
- orev 6y agoThe “read only” nature of PDFs is a feature, not a bug. The idea being that once you distribute the PDF, it can’t be changed, and thus has more “truth” than something editable would. Even now PDF is considered an acceptable format for legal documents where Word docx is not. Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs.
- alasdairking 6y agoIncluding Word nowadays!
- metaphor 6y ago> Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs. But can you edit a properly signed[1] PDF without breaking it? From an integrity perspective, that's what matters; otherwise, it's just inherently more portable until non-repudiation becomes relevant. [1] As in not SHA-1: https://shattered.io/ https://shattered.io/
- izacus 6y ago> Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs. Well, unless you sign the PDF. Even more, you can sign each edit separately, so you can do things like add content and signatures and still verify who added what. Meaning: one party can create PDF with forms, sign it, then the party filling out the form can sign their own changes for authentication. And let's not forget the fact that PDF renders correctly on pretty much any machine you put it on - this is incredibly important.
- ethanwillis 6y agoRead up on Postscript specifically. There's some interesting history there, like Display Postscript.
- mkl 6y agoPDF is a high-quality vector format that displays the same on every device, can be produced by many different applications but use the same viewer, and has a public specification that's an ISO standard. There's very little competition. Compressed PostScript is clunky, slow, and still big, XPS was too late, DJVU is primarily for scans. Things like Word or HTML display differently on different devices, Word and many other formats are or were proprietary.
- cronopios 6y agoWhat about [DVI](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_format https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_format)?
- mkl 6y agoOnly really used for TeX-related things. Not general purpose as it can't embed fonts, and graphics is usually by embedding PostScript I think.