8 ms·

A lot of people here seem to knock PDF, but I love it. Anyone who has tried to use OpenOffice full time probably does too. We have 'descriptive text' in MS va

by axaxs 6y ago

A lot of people here seem to knock PDF, but I love it. Anyone who has tried to use OpenOffice full time probably does too. We have 'descriptive text' in MS various formats, or even html/css. The problem is every implementer does things in slightly different ways. So my beautiful OpenOffice resume renders with odd spacing and pages with 1 line of text in MS Office. With PDF, everyone sees the same thing.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
Yes, thank you! I have exactly the same feelings, because I like the write in old versions of iWork. With a PDF, I know that whatever I export will look the same for whoever I send it to. I sometimes see people complain about how PDF sucks because it doesn't look quite the same everywhere (namely, non-Adobe readers), but if you're not doing anything fancy is pretty much does. It is, at minimum, more reliable than any other "open" format I'm aware of, save actual images.
icelancer 6y ago
I like PDF a lot. It's got its drawbacks but the universal format is really helpful for layout-driven stuff. Shrug. It gets it done.
bscphil 6y ago
> Anyone who has tried to use OpenOffice full time probably does too. I agree, I do too (LibreOffice), but for the opposite reason. Even internally, the font rendering in LibreOffice with many fonts is often quite bad. This is especially noticeable for text inside graphs in Calc. If I'm going to read something lengthy that's a LibreOffice document, I open it (in LibreOffice), and export it to a PDF. LibreOffice consistently exports beautiful PDFs (and SVG graphs), which tells me that it "knows" internally how to correctly render fonts, just that its actual renderer is quite bad.
- TwoBit 6y ago
  Is the renderer dealing with the classic small text glyph hinting problem?
  - bscphil 6y ago
    Could be. I'm not sure what the issue is. Firefox, Chrome, and basically every other thing I use works fine.
Finnucane 6y ago
PDF is very good for what it was designed to do, which is to represent pages for printing. It is not so good for use cases where parsing the text is more important than preserving layout.
- pmiller2 6y ago
  Indeed, I often say there's a special place in Hell where there are programmers trying to extract data from PDFs.
  - paledot 6y ago
    The souls who labour there, in life, posted PDFs to websites when HTML would have sufficed.
taneq 6y ago
Ugh, yeah I use LibreOffice for all my internal stuff but I have to keep MS Office installed for editing externally-visible documents, so I can be (somewhat) sure the formatting isn't going to get screwed up.
Spooky23 6y ago
The audience here is developers and other geeks who get stuck dealing with PDFs. The issue when you read into it is usually about structured data delivered via PDF — which I would wholeheartedly agree is a monstrous and unnecessary misuse of the format. The other thing that is unfair is assholes who deliver tabular data in PDF format usually don’t want you to have it. When your county clerk prints a report, photocopies it 30 times, crumples it and scans to PDF without OCR, that’s not a file format issue.
nine_k 6y ago
PDF is digital paper. You like it for that very quality: immutable, reproducible rendering. Those who have to extract data from PDFs face nearly the same problem as those who have to deal with paper scans: no reliable structure in the data, the source of truth is the optical recognition, by human or by machine.
- axaxs 6y ago
  I agree, but my argument here is that it's up to the producer. They obviously wanted it to be a digital paper, for some reason, and not a data mining source. We should blame the producers, not the format. It's equivalent to saying it's hard to get the source code from the pesky exe files people distribute, so exe is a mess.
  - pathseeker 6y ago
    > They obviously wanted it to be a digital paper, for some reason, and not a data mining source. "Because it's pretty" is it. 99% of people don't care about text being a data mining source.
    - bee_rider 6y ago
      Alternatively, "the journal only accepts LaTeX." I quite like PDFs, but this thread has been an eye-opener.
    - ntucker 6y ago
      The original goal of PDF was to create documents that could "view and print anywhere" (literally the original tagline of the Acrobat project), substantially the same as how the document creator intended them. What Adobe was trying to solve was the problem of sending someone a document that looked a particular way and when they rendered it on their printer or display, it looked different, e.g. having a different number of pages because subtle font differences caused word-wrapping to change the number of lines and thus the page flow. It wasn't about it being "pretty," it was about having functional differences due to local rendering and font availability. In this regard, the format is an emphatic success. I do wish they had focused a bit more on non-visual aspects such as screen-reader data, but to say the whole point is "because it's pretty" is a bit uncharitable. The format doesn't solve the problem you wish it solved, but it does solve a problem other than making things "pretty."
aikah 6y ago
> A lot of people here seem to knock PDF, but I love it. People will disabilities that rely on screen-readers don't love it. There is no such a problem with HTML/CSS which should be the norm for internet documents. > With PDF, everyone sees the same thing. Yes, provided you can see at first place...
- IncRnd 6y ago
  Adobe Reader has an option to Read Aloud PDF files. I don't know how well or poor that works, but I'm writing this comment just in case you were not aware of that function.
  - z3t4 6y ago
    The problem is that you cant parse PDFs reliably. Half of the time they are just bitmap images from a scanner.
    - jlokier 6y ago
      Some Word documents are like that too! Can't blame the PDF format if the source material is a bunch of scans.
    - daveFNbuck 6y ago
      html/css has a similar problem. A lot of my email is just a collection of images that contain text.
      - franga2000 6y ago
        I absolutely hate those, but the HTML spec does require the alt attribute which is actually used in practice quite commonly.
        daveFNbuck 6y ago
        I've never read the HTML spec directly until checking it now to verify your comment. I usually use MDN, which says that the alt attribute is not mandatory. [1] [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Img https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Im...
IncRnd 6y ago
As someone who actually used to program in PostScript, I am happy as a clam with PDFs! There are two issues with parsing them however. 1) PDF is an output format and was never intended to have the display text be parseable. 2) PDF is PostScript++, which means that is is a programming language. This means that a PDF is also an input description to the output that we are all familiar with seeing on a page. PS I don't know if it is the case anymore, but Macs used to have a display server that handled all screen images in PDF format. That was an optimization from the NeXT display server, which displayed using Display PostScript.
- JadeNB 6y ago
  > PS I don't know if it is the case anymore, but Macs used to have a display server that handled all screen images in PDF format. That was an optimization from the NeXT display server, which displayed using Display PostScript. Quartz! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of_PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of...
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    AHA! Thank you.
- tonyedgecombe 6y ago
  >PDF is PostScript++, which means that is is a programming language. The big change that came with PDF was removing the programming capabilities. A PDF file is like an unrolled version of the same PostScript file. There is still a residue of PostScript left but in no way can it be described as a programming language.
  - IncRnd 6y ago
    PDF is absolutely a programming language. It is not a general purpose programming language but a page description language. You are referring to looping constructs and procedures being removed, but a loop does not a language make. Similarly, LaTeX and sed are programming languages.
willvarfar 6y ago
The problem you have is that its likely, increasingly likely, that your CV is the exact document that will next be 'read' by computer rather than a human. I know something about that area. Today, perhaps a 10th of CVs are sorted and prescreened by software. That fraction will only increase.
iovrthoughtthis 6y ago
And yet everyone is different, on different devices. Why should they all see the same thing? Using PDF here is self serving. It’s actively user-hostile.
arnvald 6y ago
> everyone sees the same thing Mostly. I've seen issues where PDF looked fine on a Mac but not on Windows. Also, the fact that you see the same thing everywhere is good if you have one context of looking at things - e.g. if everyone uses big screen or if everyone prints the document, that's fine. But reading PDFs on e-book readers or smartphones can be a nightmare.
- leephillips 6y ago
  If the PDF uses a font that the creator neglected to embed, the reader’s system will have to supply the font, which could be a substitute. This is the only case I’ve seen where the PDF did not render exactly the same on all systems.
DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago
> With PDF, everyone sees the same thing. SVG does that too, but it can also have aria tags to improve accessibility and have text that can be extracted much more easily.

by axaxs 6y ago

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

Yes, thank you! I have exactly the same feelings, because I like the write in old versions of iWork. With a PDF, I know that whatever I export will look the same for whoever I send it to. I sometimes see people complain about how PDF sucks because it doesn't look quite the same everywhere (namely, non-Adobe readers), but if you're not doing anything fancy is pretty much does. It is, at minimum, more reliable than any other "open" format I'm aware of, save actual images.

icelancer 6y ago

I like PDF a lot. It's got its drawbacks but the universal format is really helpful for layout-driven stuff. Shrug. It gets it done.

bscphil 6y ago

> Anyone who has tried to use OpenOffice full time probably does too. I agree, I do too (LibreOffice), but for the opposite reason. Even internally, the font rendering in LibreOffice with many fonts is often quite bad. This is especially noticeable for text inside graphs in Calc. If I'm going to read something lengthy that's a LibreOffice document, I open it (in LibreOffice), and export it to a PDF. LibreOffice consistently exports beautiful PDFs (and SVG graphs), which tells me that it "knows" internally how to correctly render fonts, just that its actual renderer is quite bad.

TwoBit 6y ago
Is the renderer dealing with the classic small text glyph hinting problem?
- bscphil 6y ago
  Could be. I'm not sure what the issue is. Firefox, Chrome, and basically every other thing I use works fine.

Finnucane 6y ago

PDF is very good for what it was designed to do, which is to represent pages for printing. It is not so good for use cases where parsing the text is more important than preserving layout.

pmiller2 6y ago
Indeed, I often say there's a special place in Hell where there are programmers trying to extract data from PDFs.
- paledot 6y ago
  The souls who labour there, in life, posted PDFs to websites when HTML would have sufficed.

taneq 6y ago

Ugh, yeah I use LibreOffice for all my internal stuff but I have to keep MS Office installed for editing externally-visible documents, so I can be (somewhat) sure the formatting isn't going to get screwed up.

Spooky23 6y ago

The audience here is developers and other geeks who get stuck dealing with PDFs. The issue when you read into it is usually about structured data delivered via PDF — which I would wholeheartedly agree is a monstrous and unnecessary misuse of the format. The other thing that is unfair is assholes who deliver tabular data in PDF format usually don’t want you to have it. When your county clerk prints a report, photocopies it 30 times, crumples it and scans to PDF without OCR, that’s not a file format issue.

nine_k 6y ago

PDF is digital paper. You like it for that very quality: immutable, reproducible rendering. Those who have to extract data from PDFs face nearly the same problem as those who have to deal with paper scans: no reliable structure in the data, the source of truth is the optical recognition, by human or by machine.

axaxs 6y ago
I agree, but my argument here is that it's up to the producer. They obviously wanted it to be a digital paper, for some reason, and not a data mining source. We should blame the producers, not the format. It's equivalent to saying it's hard to get the source code from the pesky exe files people distribute, so exe is a mess.
- pathseeker 6y ago
  > They obviously wanted it to be a digital paper, for some reason, and not a data mining source. "Because it's pretty" is it. 99% of people don't care about text being a data mining source.
  - bee_rider 6y ago
    Alternatively, "the journal only accepts LaTeX." I quite like PDFs, but this thread has been an eye-opener.
  - ntucker 6y ago
    The original goal of PDF was to create documents that could "view and print anywhere" (literally the original tagline of the Acrobat project), substantially the same as how the document creator intended them. What Adobe was trying to solve was the problem of sending someone a document that looked a particular way and when they rendered it on their printer or display, it looked different, e.g. having a different number of pages because subtle font differences caused word-wrapping to change the number of lines and thus the page flow. It wasn't about it being "pretty," it was about having functional differences due to local rendering and font availability. In this regard, the format is an emphatic success. I do wish they had focused a bit more on non-visual aspects such as screen-reader data, but to say the whole point is "because it's pretty" is a bit uncharitable. The format doesn't solve the problem you wish it solved, but it does solve a problem other than making things "pretty."

aikah 6y ago

> A lot of people here seem to knock PDF, but I love it. People will disabilities that rely on screen-readers don't love it. There is no such a problem with HTML/CSS which should be the norm for internet documents. > With PDF, everyone sees the same thing. Yes, provided you can see at first place...

IncRnd 6y ago
Adobe Reader has an option to Read Aloud PDF files. I don't know how well or poor that works, but I'm writing this comment just in case you were not aware of that function.
- z3t4 6y ago
  The problem is that you cant parse PDFs reliably. Half of the time they are just bitmap images from a scanner.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    Some Word documents are like that too! Can't blame the PDF format if the source material is a bunch of scans.
  - daveFNbuck 6y ago
    html/css has a similar problem. A lot of my email is just a collection of images that contain text.
    - franga2000 6y ago
      I absolutely hate those, but the HTML spec does require the alt attribute which is actually used in practice quite commonly.
      - daveFNbuck 6y ago
        I've never read the HTML spec directly until checking it now to verify your comment. I usually use MDN, which says that the alt attribute is not mandatory. [1] [1] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Img https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTML/Element/Im...

IncRnd 6y ago

As someone who actually used to program in PostScript, I am happy as a clam with PDFs! There are two issues with parsing them however. 1) PDF is an output format and was never intended to have the display text be parseable. 2) PDF is PostScript++, which means that is is a programming language. This means that a PDF is also an input description to the output that we are all familiar with seeing on a page. PS I don't know if it is the case anymore, but Macs used to have a display server that handled all screen images in PDF format. That was an optimization from the NeXT display server, which displayed using Display PostScript.

JadeNB 6y ago
> PS I don't know if it is the case anymore, but Macs used to have a display server that handled all screen images in PDF format. That was an optimization from the NeXT display server, which displayed using Display PostScript. Quartz! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of_PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quartz_(graphics_layer)#Use_of...
- IncRnd 6y ago
  AHA! Thank you.
tonyedgecombe 6y ago
>PDF is PostScript++, which means that is is a programming language. The big change that came with PDF was removing the programming capabilities. A PDF file is like an unrolled version of the same PostScript file. There is still a residue of PostScript left but in no way can it be described as a programming language.
- IncRnd 6y ago
  PDF is absolutely a programming language. It is not a general purpose programming language but a page description language. You are referring to looping constructs and procedures being removed, but a loop does not a language make. Similarly, LaTeX and sed are programming languages.

willvarfar 6y ago

The problem you have is that its likely, increasingly likely, that your CV is the exact document that will next be 'read' by computer rather than a human. I know something about that area. Today, perhaps a 10th of CVs are sorted and prescreened by software. That fraction will only increase.

iovrthoughtthis 6y ago

And yet everyone is different, on different devices. Why should they all see the same thing? Using PDF here is self serving. It’s actively user-hostile.

arnvald 6y ago

> everyone sees the same thing Mostly. I've seen issues where PDF looked fine on a Mac but not on Windows. Also, the fact that you see the same thing everywhere is good if you have one context of looking at things - e.g. if everyone uses big screen or if everyone prints the document, that's fine. But reading PDFs on e-book readers or smartphones can be a nightmare.

leephillips 6y ago
If the PDF uses a font that the creator neglected to embed, the reader’s system will have to supply the font, which could be a substitute. This is the only case I’ve seen where the PDF did not render exactly the same on all systems.

DarkWiiPlayer 6y ago

> With PDF, everyone sees the same thing. SVG does that too, but it can also have aria tags to improve accessibility and have text that can be extracted much more easily.