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>PDF is a lossy conversion I am not finding this to be true. Pretty much every PDF I have has been usable for extracting the text content - unless the Web aut

>PDF is a lossy conversion I am not finding this to be true. Pretty much every PDF I have has been usable for extracting the text content - unless the Web authors intentionally work to obfuscate/disable this functionality, i.e. using images to display text content. >PDF is not a good way to archive web pages, either manually or programmatically. I disagree, entirely, with your conclusion - you haven't made a strong argument. 20,000+ fully-searchable, indexable, accessible-in-offline PDF files vs. your opinion so far. I don't see any of the issues you've stated are insurmountable - in fact, I find the reality to be completely the opposite to your stated opinion. Please expand on this if you have the energy.

pvg 6y ago
fully-searchable, indexable, accessible-in-offline Probably the shortest version of the point I'm trying to make is that every current browser does a much better job of providing you this than printing to PDF. If you rely on this as a personal web archiving system, you're going to lose data in the most irritating way - data you thought you collected but actually didn't.
- fit2rule 6y ago
  I don't understand your point at all. In what way is a browser going to give me information that is not available to me unless I'm online? PDF's of sites I've visited have all the data I need - the stuff I read that then prompted me to print to PDF. I've searched and I'm yet to find a single PDF in my collection that doesn't have the info that prompted me to save it in the first place. I understand you believe your point is strong - its still not being made in a way that I can relate.
  - pvg 6y ago
    In what way is a browser going to give me information that is not available to me unless I'm online? The alternatives I'm talking about are absolutely available offline. I don't understand why you keep arguing against a position I've never taken.
  - fauigerzigerk 6y ago
    PDF conversion throws away almost all of the structure contained in HTML. Tools like pdf2text then try to reconstruct some of that structure (such as the correct sequence of letters and words) using complex heuristics that don't always work. They often do that successfully enough, especially if all you want is to grep for words. pdf2text also has a table mode that attempts to reconstruct table structured content. This is far less successful. So depending on how you want to process your stored data, saving as PDF may or may not preserve sufficient information. If you were storing pages for the purpose of extracting specific properties of things you are researching (say product information or the tree structure of HN threads), then throwing away all that structure makes it a lot more difficult or even impossible to reconstruct the information you need. If I were storing pages for unknown future purposes, I wouldn't want to throw away any information I might need, and therefore I would never use PDF as an archival format. But I understand that you store PDF files for a very specific purpose for which lossy PDF conversion happens to be good enough. So that's fine of course. The only question I have is where I can find the source URL of the stored pages.
    - fit2rule 6y ago
      >structure contained in HTML. As long as I can read the site, I have what I need. Why do I need to read the HTML? >So depending on how you want to process your stored data, saving as PDF may or may not preserve sufficient information. As long as I can read it, the PDF is sufficient for my needs. For everything else, there's wget.

pvg 6y ago

fully-searchable, indexable, accessible-in-offline Probably the shortest version of the point I'm trying to make is that every current browser does a much better job of providing you this than printing to PDF. If you rely on this as a personal web archiving system, you're going to lose data in the most irritating way - data you thought you collected but actually didn't.

fit2rule 6y ago
I don't understand your point at all. In what way is a browser going to give me information that is not available to me unless I'm online? PDF's of sites I've visited have all the data I need - the stuff I read that then prompted me to print to PDF. I've searched and I'm yet to find a single PDF in my collection that doesn't have the info that prompted me to save it in the first place. I understand you believe your point is strong - its still not being made in a way that I can relate.
- pvg 6y ago
  In what way is a browser going to give me information that is not available to me unless I'm online? The alternatives I'm talking about are absolutely available offline. I don't understand why you keep arguing against a position I've never taken.
- fauigerzigerk 6y ago
  PDF conversion throws away almost all of the structure contained in HTML. Tools like pdf2text then try to reconstruct some of that structure (such as the correct sequence of letters and words) using complex heuristics that don't always work. They often do that successfully enough, especially if all you want is to grep for words. pdf2text also has a table mode that attempts to reconstruct table structured content. This is far less successful. So depending on how you want to process your stored data, saving as PDF may or may not preserve sufficient information. If you were storing pages for the purpose of extracting specific properties of things you are researching (say product information or the tree structure of HN threads), then throwing away all that structure makes it a lot more difficult or even impossible to reconstruct the information you need. If I were storing pages for unknown future purposes, I wouldn't want to throw away any information I might need, and therefore I would never use PDF as an archival format. But I understand that you store PDF files for a very specific purpose for which lossy PDF conversion happens to be good enough. So that's fine of course. The only question I have is where I can find the source URL of the stored pages.
  - fit2rule 6y ago
    >structure contained in HTML. As long as I can read the site, I have what I need. Why do I need to read the HTML? >So depending on how you want to process your stored data, saving as PDF may or may not preserve sufficient information. As long as I can read it, the PDF is sufficient for my needs. For everything else, there's wget.