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> data dumps from local governments that could have been machine-readable, or announcements that are distributed in print and emailed as PDFs, rather than lifti
by axiolite 6y ago
> data dumps from local governments that could have been machine-readable, or announcements that are distributed in print and emailed as PDFs, rather than lifting the content into the message body.
You should thank PDF for giving you any useful electronic copies at all.
If it's scanned-in papers, sticking them loosly in an e-mail or web page would be much more difficult to read through.
If it's text data, then perhaps it was primarily composed to be printed, and PDF allows easy creation of readable electronic copies with minimum of effort from any input. Before PDF you might have gotten nothing at all, because most people don't have readers for various obscure proprietary input formats.
And PDF is far easier than other formats to convert into another format for your own consumption. Do you have a command-line tool which will extract the embedded images out of a Microsoft Word document? Or one that will convert it to plain text, preserving formatting? pdfimages and pdftotext -layout are very widely available.
- Aeolun 6y ago> You should thank PDF for giving you any useful electronic copies at all. I think the point is that data dumps in PDF format are not useful at all. I take objection to your statement that it’s easier to convert. The only reason there are so many tools to do so is because it’s so hard/impossible in the first place.
- axiolite 6y ago> The only reason there are so many tools to do so is because it’s so hard What exactly do you base that on? Have you written any PDF or postscript utilities? Images are easily located in rather discrete chunks, and they are conveniently stored in standard formats like JPEG. Preserving the layout of text output takes a bit of work, but otherwise extracting text and images is just about a necessary first early step in writing any PDF viewer. And I do believe even very early PDF viewers allowed arbitrary copy/paste of text.
- Aeolun 6y agoI’ve attempted, and given up on, writing and reading PDF files more often than I can count. Conversely, I’ve only ever tried to write a (new) word file once, since it all worked right away.