4 ms·

Isn't it the same for PDF format spec?

• atakan_gurkan 1y ago
  No. There are hundreds of programs that easily read and create PDFs. OTOH, reading .docx is a pain. Far be it from me to defend Adobe, but PDF is nothing like MS Office formats.
  • jahewson 1y ago
    Ooh that’s not fair. Many PDFs don’t conform to the spec and how Acrobat processes them is completely undocumented.
    • troupo 1y ago
      It was funny for a few years when Apple just released Preview, and it rendered many PDFs better than Adobe's own Acrobat
      • Synaesthesia 1y ago
        Yeah it's a great app, one of the big reasons I still use MacOS - but there's certain features which you still need Adobe Acrobat for, I know to fill in the tax forms for my country you do.
  • zerr 1y ago
    I mean the rendering part. AFAIK there are no that many renderers.
• cogman10 1y ago
  The PDF spec is well designed to be both very expandable and easily readable. It's absolutely horrible to try and edit. That's because the structure of a PDF is essentially a bunch of media "streams". It's very easy to say "render a jpeg at this location on the page" but that's about it. It doesn't store, for example, the fact that you might need to wrap words around a page. Instead, it's "Here's a box with text in it". The only thing that really could make PDF rendering hard is adobe put a whole bunch of garbage into the spec. For example, the full spec had the ability to run javascript and flash at one point (not sure if it does anymore).
  • mook 1y ago
    JavaScript must still be there, because I think that's how form validation works? Don't recall Flash ever being there though.
    • stop50 1y ago
      It was acrobat reader, but not in the standard. For some time only the reader was needed and not the player.
• izacus 1y ago
  No, that spec is outright nice if you consider the PCs it was made for.