5 ms·
Obviously not in all cases, but lots of times, page numbers matter. Books, user manuals, accounts, agreements, all benefit from "on page 4" type descriptions.
by bruce511 3y ago
Obviously not in all cases, but lots of times, page numbers matter. Books, user manuals, accounts, agreements, all benefit from "on page 4" type descriptions.
Outside of that, PDFs are "hard" to edit (unintentionally) so for a quote or invoice I know you're seeing what I sent you. I've never had a PDF "updated" by a manager on my side, or yours.
And yeah, ultimately, they're often printed if they're legal or accounting.
- lxgr 3y agoUpdating PDFs is very doable. I believe even Adobe Acrobat (the paid version) lets you do minor edits to text in PDFs these days: Maybe not changing entire paragraphs, but definitely changing a date or amount here and there. Relying on your business partners or colleagues not knowing how to do this seems risky: If you can’t trust them, I’d personally use PDF signatures or at least hashes of the entire file.
- bobbylarrybobby 3y agoThose references should just be hyperlinks to an anchor. You could then use the browser to go backwards and forwards between the destination and the source.
- livrem 3y agoAny sane document will have numbered headers and sub-headers that you can refer to in an unambiguous way no matter how the document is formatted, or if you view it on a screen or on paper.
- bruce511 3y agoOnce printed, hyperlinks stop working. If we want a format that prints terribly, but is great onscreen, and contains links, we already have that in HTML. If we want permanence and exact printing, we already have that in PDF.
- cxr 3y agoYou think you're making a case about the shortcomings of HTML. You're really just demonstrating how crummy page numbers are as a citation format. If you want to cite a figure X from chapter Y, then cite figure X from chapter Y.
- itishappy 3y agoWhat if I want to find figure X from chapter Y? What if the chapters are much longer than a page length would be? What if there's only 3 figures in a 100000 word document? These aren't impossible problems. A well formatted index or table of contents gets you most of the way there. But what if we used some sort of immutable reference? We could add new reference locations after some fixed amount of content such that they're never too far away, and we could even print these references at the bottom of each section for ease of use!
- cxr 3y ago> We could add new reference locations after some fixed amount of content such that they're never too far away, and we could even print these references at the bottom of each section for ease of use! How does HTML hinder this?
- lxgr 3y agoWhy do we need to have two formats that each excel at one task and quite miserably fail at the other? I don't think it would be impossible to e.g. extend a variant of HTML (and ePub already supports this to some extent, I believe) to have a more stable print output (e.g. fixed pagination and page number hints) for when it's required, while still allowing reflowing, proper text search. That's actually another pain point: PDFs is really a vector graphics format, so any text search is by necessity some more or less horrible heuristic layered on that. I work with a certain large company's PDF specifications every day, and they literally can't be searched in most PDF viewers, since the spaces between words seem to be done in a way not accessible to the heuristics of the readers, so everything is one large string to them.
- eviks 3y agoYou can maintain your original page numbers even with actual pages being different (say, two pages 4 with the reflown page size 50% of the original)