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PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008. The reality is that PDF is open, reliable, useful, feature r

PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008. The reality is that PDF is open, reliable, useful, feature rich, and widely accepted. It has no serious competitors. There's a reason why, unlike raster image formats, there aren't any serious competitors. The thing to realise about printed page file formats is that even if you set aside all of the silly "multimedia" and "interactivity" features, there's still a gargantuan rabbit hole of non-trivial features that need to be implemented absolutely perfectly, from kerning to spot color. PDF does it all very well. There's really no scope for a competitor to come along to make something that's obviously better.

fuzztester 3y ago
>PDF has been a free-as-in-beer standard since 1993 and a free-as-in-speech ISO standard since 2008. Yes. The first sentence of the Wikipedia article about PDF is: >Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. And the last sentence of the first paragraph of the same article is: >PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.[5] The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020. .
izacus 3y ago
Especially since there's a PDF/A standard subset for archival, which makes those documents readable decades after any other format would rot.
- throwaway2037 3y ago
  > PDF/A standard Yes, the United States Library of Congress makes heavy use. I imagine their evaluation process to select a digital archive format is very tough!