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It is too early to displace HTML with PDF. > PDFs used to be inaccessible My eyes are not very good. I have trouble reading the font in the PDF. I am using Fi

by bmn__ 5y ago

It is too early to displace HTML with PDF. > PDFs used to be inaccessible My eyes are not very good. I have trouble reading the font in the PDF. I am using Firefox. HTML lets me pick that a font that I can read easily. I cannot do that with PDF. > PDFs used to be unreadable on small screens, but now you can reflow them. I am using Firefox. I cannot do that. Realistically, how many years will I have to wait until Firefox catches up? Over twenty years ago, I learnt Web authoring by examining the source which had a profound effect on my career. That serendipitous opportunity I had with human-readable sources will be lost to the next generation with PDF - they have to learn the technology deliberately.

Santosh83 5y ago
As far as I know, it is nothing specific to Firefox. You can't set your own PDF font or reflow a non-reflowable PDF in any browser.
- chrismorgan 5y ago
  Brief investigation suggests reflow is a super-clumsy, ultra-coarse-grained view mode that is implemented by few clients, is not easy to access, is not well known, and is vastly inferior to what you can get on the web, especially as it’s basically text-only. In Adobe Acrobat (and I’m guessing Adobe Reader): Choose View → Zoom → Reflow, and it turns everything into one column of nigh-unformatted text. (Word looks like it may support it, but that could be more that it’s converted it to a Word document in some way and reflow-like functionality falls out of that naturally, though I imagine the tagging would help with the conversion; and someone in this thread mentions something called “Book Reader” supporting it.)
silon42 5y ago
>It is too early to displace HTML with PDF. 'Never' will be too early. >Realistically, how many years will I have to wait until Firefox catches up? They should better improve reflow for HTML on small devices first. Focusing on PDF is a waste of resources.
- zinekeller 5y ago
  I mean, Firefox just follows the website's command to not format it as a mobile webpage, right? But a button to forcibly reflow is handy though.
x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago
Source code for websites hasn't been readable for years. Reading a minimized JS document that has mauled the DOM is only slightly more readable than the structure of a PDF.
simias 5y ago
My understanding is that PDF is a monster of a document format, and it's clearly not (usually and historically) meant to be reflowed. Even copy/pasting from PDFs can be very disconcerting because the viewer may not have a good idea of where blocks of text start and end (or even what the characters really are). I can empathize with the feeling that the web is incredibly bloated, but that's IMO throwing the baby with the bath water. Simple HTML with some optional CSS would do the job much better IMO (and can be easily downloaded, mirrored or offlined with tools like wget). And if you really don't like writing HTML (I won't blame you) then there's always formats like markdown, org-mode and friends which can easily be converted to pretty much anything.
- shuntress 5y ago
  Dealing with PDFs (as in, coding a system that can import/export/display them) is more obnoxious than dealing with excel spreadsheets. Unless your system is a PDF library (as in, you make the black-box dependency that other systems use to handle PDF exports), everything you do with PDFs will be through some annoying black-box dependency that is a pain to use. Even relatively complex HTML is much more fun to work with than PDF.
qznc 5y ago
At least it looks more beautiful than terminal-only Gemini sites. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_%28protocol%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_%28protocol%29
- majewsky 5y ago
  Gemini is as "terminal-only" as Markdown. Just because it's a text format first and foremost, does not mean that you can't display it nicely formatted. It's more like EPUB in that regard.
  - qznc 5y ago
    Unfortunately, many Gemini sites expect a fixed-width font for alignment.
- II2II 5y ago
  Gemini sites are not terminal-only and the renderer can make it look beautiful (depending upon one's definition of beautiful). One example is Lagrange: https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange
marcosdumay 5y ago
The one piece of software that I know that lets you reflow PDFs is Calibre. And the results aren't great.
titzer 5y ago
> Over twenty years ago, I learnt Web authoring by examining the source So did I. Now, it is impossible to reverse engineer the metric crapton of minified JS and CSS cryptoglyphics that comprise the modern web.
- rollcat 5y ago
  TBH it's a little bit like complaining you can't open a modern binary executable in a hex editor and learn programming from that. Days of doing your regular coding by writing direct machine code or assembly are (mostly) gone, and for the sake of advancing the craft, I'm (mostly) happy with it. But I too wish the modern web was simpler. It took an evolutionary path of maintaining just enough backwards compatibility to only keep making things worse. Efforts like Gemini[1] bring some hope but I'm afraid the medium won't be flexible enough for much beyond personal blogs. But maybe that's for the better. [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space; https://gemini.circumlunar.space; gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space

by bmn__ 5y ago

Santosh83 5y ago

As far as I know, it is nothing specific to Firefox. You can't set your own PDF font or reflow a non-reflowable PDF in any browser.

chrismorgan 5y ago
Brief investigation suggests reflow is a super-clumsy, ultra-coarse-grained view mode that is implemented by few clients, is not easy to access, is not well known, and is vastly inferior to what you can get on the web, especially as it’s basically text-only. In Adobe Acrobat (and I’m guessing Adobe Reader): Choose View → Zoom → Reflow, and it turns everything into one column of nigh-unformatted text. (Word looks like it may support it, but that could be more that it’s converted it to a Word document in some way and reflow-like functionality falls out of that naturally, though I imagine the tagging would help with the conversion; and someone in this thread mentions something called “Book Reader” supporting it.)

silon42 5y ago

>It is too early to displace HTML with PDF. 'Never' will be too early. >Realistically, how many years will I have to wait until Firefox catches up? They should better improve reflow for HTML on small devices first. Focusing on PDF is a waste of resources.

zinekeller 5y ago
I mean, Firefox just follows the website's command to not format it as a mobile webpage, right? But a button to forcibly reflow is handy though.

x86_64Ubuntu 5y ago

Source code for websites hasn't been readable for years. Reading a minimized JS document that has mauled the DOM is only slightly more readable than the structure of a PDF.

simias 5y ago

My understanding is that PDF is a monster of a document format, and it's clearly not (usually and historically) meant to be reflowed. Even copy/pasting from PDFs can be very disconcerting because the viewer may not have a good idea of where blocks of text start and end (or even what the characters really are). I can empathize with the feeling that the web is incredibly bloated, but that's IMO throwing the baby with the bath water. Simple HTML with some optional CSS would do the job much better IMO (and can be easily downloaded, mirrored or offlined with tools like wget). And if you really don't like writing HTML (I won't blame you) then there's always formats like markdown, org-mode and friends which can easily be converted to pretty much anything.

shuntress 5y ago
Dealing with PDFs (as in, coding a system that can import/export/display them) is more obnoxious than dealing with excel spreadsheets. Unless your system is a PDF library (as in, you make the black-box dependency that other systems use to handle PDF exports), everything you do with PDFs will be through some annoying black-box dependency that is a pain to use. Even relatively complex HTML is much more fun to work with than PDF.

qznc 5y ago

At least it looks more beautiful than terminal-only Gemini sites. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_%28protocol%29 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gemini_%28protocol%29

majewsky 5y ago
Gemini is as "terminal-only" as Markdown. Just because it's a text format first and foremost, does not mean that you can't display it nicely formatted. It's more like EPUB in that regard.
- qznc 5y ago
  Unfortunately, many Gemini sites expect a fixed-width font for alignment.
II2II 5y ago
Gemini sites are not terminal-only and the renderer can make it look beautiful (depending upon one's definition of beautiful). One example is Lagrange: https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange https://github.com/skyjake/lagrange

marcosdumay 5y ago

The one piece of software that I know that lets you reflow PDFs is Calibre. And the results aren't great.

titzer 5y ago

> Over twenty years ago, I learnt Web authoring by examining the source So did I. Now, it is impossible to reverse engineer the metric crapton of minified JS and CSS cryptoglyphics that comprise the modern web.

rollcat 5y ago
TBH it's a little bit like complaining you can't open a modern binary executable in a hex editor and learn programming from that. Days of doing your regular coding by writing direct machine code or assembly are (mostly) gone, and for the sake of advancing the craft, I'm (mostly) happy with it. But I too wish the modern web was simpler. It took an evolutionary path of maintaining just enough backwards compatibility to only keep making things worse. Efforts like Gemini[1] bring some hope but I'm afraid the medium won't be flexible enough for much beyond personal blogs. But maybe that's for the better. [1]: https://gemini.circumlunar.space; https://gemini.circumlunar.space; gemini://gemini.circumlunar.space