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Reflowable PDFs were the Correct Answer. Since the beginning. IMHO Adobe has been a terrible steward of PDF. I have no idea why. (Source: Used to write print p
by specialist 6y ago
Reflowable PDFs were the Correct Answer. Since the beginning.
IMHO Adobe has been a terrible steward of PDF. I have no idea why. (Source: Used to write print production software in the 90s. Some of my team went to Adobe. One was bored so banged out a PostScript clone hooked up to the newer image library in a few weeks. They all said the PDF libraries were garbage, everyone was afraid to breathe on them, no one was motivated to do anything better.)
Re NNG: Agree. +1 Don Norman, whereas Nielsen and Tog haven't said anything interesting in ages.
- ChrisMarshallNY 6y agoI didn't even know there was such a thing as reflowable PDF. Agree. EPUB is a fairly half-baked solution. Reflowable PDF might have been good, but, I guess there was never any support for it.
- specialist 6y agoYa. One needful use case was (is?) variable data printing, allowing mass customization, like direct mail. Pretty much the same technical progression that happened in user interfaces going from absolute coords and static layout to dynamic layout managers. The fix was so easy. Just retain some of the source document's meta data, eg this group of glyphs are a "paragraph". The PDF object model was explicitly designed for exactly this kind of extension. IIRC Some specialty vendors had some goofy work-arounds, like a post process tool for manually marking paragraphs. But Adobe could never be bothered.