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Because it was designed as a graphical output format, not an editable format. Some of the "compression" tricks it allows one to use (eg. font subsetting, even
by necovek 1y ago
Because it was designed as a graphical output format, not an editable format.
Some of the "compression" tricks it allows one to use (eg. font subsetting, even remapping characters to use fewer bits to encode text) may make the data only keep the same appearance, and semantic encoding would be gone (for example, "A" may stand for "#").
It's actually quite similar in nature to TeX's DVI format (boxes and their positions), though obviously not a bitmap format but a vector one with all the deps embedded.
This means that, for instance, using non-default kerning and whitespace will lead to all text becoming box-per-character thrown around the page.
- superconduct123 1y agoI see, so its like a lower level format than say a word doc or markdown
- necovek 1y agoI wouldn's say that: it's really a "drawing" format for paged documents, and not a text format. There is a concept of accessible PDFs, where care is taken during generation to make it as semantic as possible for screen readers etc. Editing those is usually much simpler. The fact that text-editing tools are a common source for PDFs would mean that those text-editing tools are really where you should edit the source and regenerate. It's like asking why are compiled binaries or minified JS so hard to edit?