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> A static document that can't do any fuckery around preventing me from copying text or doing their own weird implementation of scrolling or breaking back/forwa
by JadeNB 6y ago
> A static document that can't do any fuckery around preventing me from copying text or doing their own weird implementation of scrolling or breaking back/forwards navigation or anything else that modern websites love to do.
You can, and I do, hope for this, and it's often what you get, but it's not at all guaranteed by the format. For example, PDF allows JavaScript: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/js_api_reference.pdf https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdf... . I think most readers other than Acrobat probably don't support it (which, of course, Adobe spins as a feature of Acrobat!), and not too many PDFs require it—although I do find that fillable PDFs, including from hopefully capable authors like the IRS, can be very finicky in anything other than Acrobat—but I fear it's only a matter of time until it becomes as difficult to "browse the PDF without JavaScript" as it currently is to browse the web without it.
> I don't want random authors to be able to dictate how I interact with a medium
On this score you're out of luck even now—if the author, intentionally or unintentionally, did a bad job creating the PDF, you're out of luck. This is one area where I'll give HTML the win: it is, or can be, good at things like dynamic reflow, whereas PDF not only isn't but, I believe, effectively can't be.
- Voliokis 6y ago> On this score you're out of luck even now—if the author, intentionally or unintentionally, did a bad job creating the PDF, you're out of luck. This is one area where I'll give HTML the win: it is, or can be, good at things like dynamic reflow, whereas PDF not only isn't but, I believe, effectively can't be. I'm not sure what you mean. I've never had an ebook or paper have any influence on how my PDF reader works or how I interact with it.
- JadeNB 6y ago> I'm not sure what you mean. I've never had an ebook or paper have any influence on how my PDF reader works or how I interact with it. I was responding to a quote which I think, in retrospect, I misread: > > I don't want random authors to be able to dictate how I interact with a medium To me, random authors of PDF files do dictate how I interact with the content of the PDF file—I'm not sure whether or not to call that "the medium"—because they lay it out, and there is very little that I can do after the fact if, for example, I don't like their line breaks or their text layout, or if I want to be able to do a proper full text search, or cut and paste, etc. etc. However, on re-reading (including your response above), it seems clear that what you meant, and what I should have understood, was not about being locked into the author's presentational choices, but about the UI of the PDF reader itself. I agree that what I said is irrelevant to this.