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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.

by 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."
thayne 6y ago
PDF is great for what it was originally designed for: a portable format for instructing printers on how to print a document. The problem is people using it in ways it wasn't designed for. Sharing a PDF of your document is about as useful as sharing an SVG export of your document (actually, an SVG probably has more semantic information). It is a vector image format, not a document format.

by axaxs 6y ago

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."

thayne 6y ago

PDF is great for what it was originally designed for: a portable format for instructing printers on how to print a document. The problem is people using it in ways it wasn't designed for. Sharing a PDF of your document is about as useful as sharing an SVG export of your document (actually, an SVG probably has more semantic information). It is a vector image format, not a document format.