3 ms·

PDFs should be only for printing or maybe for keeping scanned versions of things. For anything else they're just not the right tool for the job. Not for things

by Worf 5mo ago

PDFs should be only for printing or maybe for keeping scanned versions of things. For anything else they're just not the right tool for the job. Not for things meant to be accessed on a computer like books, scientific papers or, for some weird reason, catalogs and price lists from websites. We have responsive and open standards like HTML and EPUB (zipped XTML) and they work great. arXiv has HTML papers, and libgen and anna's archive often have EPUB versions of books. The issue for me with EPUB is the lack of good readers now.

FailMore 5mo ago
Interesting point. What do you feel about the "business world"'s heavy use of PDFs? There is something to be said about the file format being trusted/so dominant now... probably some random sequence of events led to this happening... but perhaps hard to shift
- Sharlin 5mo ago
  Because the business world used to run on paper, and pdf became the de facto standard desktop publishing file format because Adobe became the de facto king of desktop publishing. Storing, transferring, and reading documents on paper has given way for doing all of that digitally, but path dependency guarantees that there’s no way of getting rid of PDF now. Purely psychologically, I think there’s something that feels more "secure" or long-lasting about PDF’s perceived quasi-immutability compared to formats designed to be edited.
  - FailMore 5mo ago
    Yeah, I think the point about editing is a very good one. There is something comforting about them and perhaps that's it (+ maybe we are used to them being A4 pages, so you know what to expect). I think also the lack of flexibility with rendering is good, if you see it on one device you know exactly how it will look on another device.
    - Worf 5mo ago
      But you can actually edit PDFs if you're into pain. For immutability there are hashes, signatures and so on. I've seen rendering differences on different readers over the years. Rarely, but it happens. Probably not for basic documents or scanned papers. At least with HTML or Markdown you can read the source.
gf000 5mo ago
I don't know, I really love a well-typeset books/papers. Especially when they feature figures that are deliberately placed close to the relevant section in the text, it's just not something we can replicate with HTML, that can barely do proper justified text. Sure, I would like that beautifully designed page to magically become a single column beautiful document on my phone, but I will take the former over a badly designed text extract where the relevant figure is 10 pages away. Epub (=html) is good for novels, but there is nothing replacing PDF for science papers. If anything, the latex (or ideally typst) source would come the closest, if properly written (not absolute offsets). That could be used to produce different page sized versions.
- Worf 5mo ago
  The "figures that are deliberately placed close to the relevant section in the text" is something I've heard often, and I'd agree to an extent. But the figure is never 10 pages away (unless you have a tiny screen or something). It's easy to put an image inbetween 2 paragraphs. With PDF papers 1 figure is often referenced in several places throughout the paper so I just open 2 windows with the paper anyway. For justified text - what's the point of stretching each line artificially just so they align at the end? It looks awful to me even when done "correctly". Having uneven spaces makes it harder to read. Having every line align on the right also makes it harder to read. When you have uneven lines, I subconsciously use the different at the end as an anchor for where I am in the text or where a certain phrase was. Hyphenating words is another thing that doesn't make a lot of sense nowadays - we have enough words with a hyphen naturally in them, so reading a broken up word is mentally taxing as I have to figure out if it's a normal word with a hyphen or a broken up one. All the arXiv HTML papers are much better to read in the browser, IMO. And they'll only get better. PDF will likely stay the same. For small screens like phones or tablets, having to constantly scroll up and down and left and right for a 2-column paper is just painful. PDF is much better on a big screen.
  - jkscm 5mo ago
    Just look at examples like this: https://www.google.de/books/edition/Exploration_Map_by_Map/sy8kEQAAQBAJ?hl=de&gbpv=1&dq=map%20by%20map&pg=PA10&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.de/books/edition/Exploration_Map_by_Map/s... You will realize that saying "PDFs should be only for printing" is a vast oversimplifcation for the requirements people have for different kinds of documents.
danhor 5mo ago
A PDF of a long document such as a standard or reference manual is almost always preferable to an HTML version. HTML versions have issues with formatting, searching (as browsers struggle with multi-thousand page documents and non-native search document search implementations almost always suck), indexing, correct behavior on windows size change (especially a side-by-side pdf view is almost unheard of for webpages), ... . Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me.
- Worf 5mo ago
  > correct behavior on windows size change Except the PDF is not responsive at all and you can't increase or decrease the font size without increasing the whole width of page. > Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me. HTML shouldn't mean online-only. If the vendor isn't trying to make it hard to download, you should always be able to convert to PDF. But PDF to HTML is very hard or impossible.
  - adrian_b 5mo ago
    In any technical/scientific document I do not want to increase or decrease the size of any element, e.g. of one of the fonts. You only want to do an overall proportional zoom, when needed. A well-designed document page has appropriate size ratios between various kinds of texts, formulae, tables and images, which should not be corrupted by changing the size of a single element. The pages where the author has not formatted them adequately are ugly and hard to understand, which is what you typically see when this kind of content is written as HTML/EPUB documents, which are rendered non-deterministically. Lazy writers may like HTML, but readers who must read and search through vast amounts of technical documentation do not like it. There are many good PDF readers that are adequate for reading and searching even huge documents, but I have never seen any tool that works acceptably for EPUB/HTML big documents, which is not surprising because no tool can compensate the fact that the writer of the document did not design the layout of the pages carefully.
    - Worf 5mo ago
mcdonje 5mo ago
EPUB is the ebook standard, outside of Amazon-land, so it has staying power in its space. I think it would be good for the ecosystem if it broke containment and got tooling in enough places to challenge PDF.
jkscm 5mo ago
slighlty disagree with this. A fixed page layout has it's own advantages. The reason we have more high quality pdf readers than epub readers is probrably connected to the format itself. PDF readers usally are more more feature complete when it comes to stuff like annotations too.
- Worf 5mo ago
  My issue with EPUB readers is about features a PDF reader wouldn't even have. Small and annoying things like how much freedom I get when changing fonts and whatnot. I haven't had a need to use annotations. I guess that could be solved by EPUB editors, but I haven't tested any, apart from any text editors after unzipping the EPUB.
  - kuekacang 5mo ago
    Somewhat agree!. I think my main gripe is that there are no good-enough reader that: - without account integration - has good ux Even some of the okay ones, most are, as tantacurl may say, janky.
adrian_b 5mo ago
HTML and EPUB work not great, but very badly for scientific or technical papers or books. No two readers render them alike, and they typically are much uglier and more difficult to use than books (sometimes even the same book) in PDF, DJVU or ODT formats. I read a very large quantity of technical documentation and I always avoid EPUB and HTML like the plague. I use such formats only when there is no alternative. On Linux, mupdf is a decent EPUB reader, which is very fast and it usually does a better job at formatting pages than most other EPUB readers that I have tried on Linux. For fast navigation and searching, especially in technical documentation with hundreds or thousands of pages, it is very useful for the document to be well partitioned into pages and the page layouts to be well designed, like for a printed book, even if this may seem unnecessary for a document stored in a computer. HTML and EPUB documents are seldom divided in uniform pages and the position of various elements, like tables or figures can vary between readers or even with the same reader in different circumstances, so when you search various things you are slowed down in recognizing them, because they may not be in the position where you have seen them previously. Moreover, in HTML and EPUB documents, depending on the reader, the size ratios between various elements may be inappropriate, making the pages ugly and/or hard to understand. All the defects of HTML and EPUB documents are caused by the fact that the writer of the document normally does not take full responsibility for the appearance of the pages, delegating this to the browsers/readers, which seldom do a good job for scientific/technical documents full of formulae, tables and figures. This may be fine for normal Web pages, but it is not acceptable for technical and scientific documents. In theory, one could design carefully HTML pages and the associated CSS files, to be rendered deterministically, but I have encountered very rarely such documents.
- Worf 5mo ago
  I understand your point that you want a fixed presentation layout and pagination. I prefer to be able to responsively resize the document and to follow the ToC instead of pages. I've yet to see documentation that's thousands of pages long that doesn't include a very detailed ToC. For me remembering "section 8.3.16.2" is better and makes more sense than remembering "page 1292". I've had to read scanned math books years ago and I remember using some PDF reader to put bookmarks that correspond to the ToC, so I'd put "2.5.1.2 - Theorem about X" in the sidebar. That's how I was able to actually go back and forth easily. With just pages it would've taken me tens of seconds to locate a theorem (or lemma, proof, definition, whatever). And it was a dense book, so I had to constantly go back and reread stuff. But I agree that PDFs can, and often do, have ToCs, too. > the size ratios between various elements may be inappropriate I can't recall having this issue on websites or on EPUBs. What kinds of elements are we talking about? HTML and CSS are pretty good at keeping sizes from what I've seen. I agree that there are many EPUB readers, most of them very unpolished. And perhaps there aren't EPUB readers that are good at everything, yet. For formulas, MathML and other tech has been satisfactory. I was able to find this basic math paper arXiv uses as a demo for their HTML papers: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1910.06709 https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1910.06709 It doesn't have figures, but the math is rendered perfectly. I can easily remove the "justify" style and increase and decrease the letters. If it was a long paper, it would've been nice to have a clickable ToC, but most EPUBs have one. I think that right now most EPUB readers and some HTML renderings are bad, but I believe they'll get better.

by Worf 5mo ago

FailMore 5mo ago

Interesting point. What do you feel about the "business world"'s heavy use of PDFs? There is something to be said about the file format being trusted/so dominant now... probably some random sequence of events led to this happening... but perhaps hard to shift

Sharlin 5mo ago
Because the business world used to run on paper, and pdf became the de facto standard desktop publishing file format because Adobe became the de facto king of desktop publishing. Storing, transferring, and reading documents on paper has given way for doing all of that digitally, but path dependency guarantees that there’s no way of getting rid of PDF now. Purely psychologically, I think there’s something that feels more "secure" or long-lasting about PDF’s perceived quasi-immutability compared to formats designed to be edited.
- FailMore 5mo ago
  Yeah, I think the point about editing is a very good one. There is something comforting about them and perhaps that's it (+ maybe we are used to them being A4 pages, so you know what to expect). I think also the lack of flexibility with rendering is good, if you see it on one device you know exactly how it will look on another device.
  - Worf 5mo ago
    But you can actually edit PDFs if you're into pain. For immutability there are hashes, signatures and so on. I've seen rendering differences on different readers over the years. Rarely, but it happens. Probably not for basic documents or scanned papers. At least with HTML or Markdown you can read the source.

gf000 5mo ago

I don't know, I really love a well-typeset books/papers. Especially when they feature figures that are deliberately placed close to the relevant section in the text, it's just not something we can replicate with HTML, that can barely do proper justified text. Sure, I would like that beautifully designed page to magically become a single column beautiful document on my phone, but I will take the former over a badly designed text extract where the relevant figure is 10 pages away. Epub (=html) is good for novels, but there is nothing replacing PDF for science papers. If anything, the latex (or ideally typst) source would come the closest, if properly written (not absolute offsets). That could be used to produce different page sized versions.

Worf 5mo ago
The "figures that are deliberately placed close to the relevant section in the text" is something I've heard often, and I'd agree to an extent. But the figure is never 10 pages away (unless you have a tiny screen or something). It's easy to put an image inbetween 2 paragraphs. With PDF papers 1 figure is often referenced in several places throughout the paper so I just open 2 windows with the paper anyway. For justified text - what's the point of stretching each line artificially just so they align at the end? It looks awful to me even when done "correctly". Having uneven spaces makes it harder to read. Having every line align on the right also makes it harder to read. When you have uneven lines, I subconsciously use the different at the end as an anchor for where I am in the text or where a certain phrase was. Hyphenating words is another thing that doesn't make a lot of sense nowadays - we have enough words with a hyphen naturally in them, so reading a broken up word is mentally taxing as I have to figure out if it's a normal word with a hyphen or a broken up one. All the arXiv HTML papers are much better to read in the browser, IMO. And they'll only get better. PDF will likely stay the same. For small screens like phones or tablets, having to constantly scroll up and down and left and right for a 2-column paper is just painful. PDF is much better on a big screen.
- jkscm 5mo ago
  Just look at examples like this: https://www.google.de/books/edition/Exploration_Map_by_Map/sy8kEQAAQBAJ?hl=de&gbpv=1&dq=map%20by%20map&pg=PA10&printsec=frontcover https://www.google.de/books/edition/Exploration_Map_by_Map/s... You will realize that saying "PDFs should be only for printing" is a vast oversimplifcation for the requirements people have for different kinds of documents.

danhor 5mo ago

A PDF of a long document such as a standard or reference manual is almost always preferable to an HTML version. HTML versions have issues with formatting, searching (as browsers struggle with multi-thousand page documents and non-native search document search implementations almost always suck), indexing, correct behavior on windows size change (especially a side-by-side pdf view is almost unheard of for webpages), ... . Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me.

Worf 5mo ago
> correct behavior on windows size change Except the PDF is not responsive at all and you can't increase or decrease the font size without increasing the whole width of page. > Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me. HTML shouldn't mean online-only. If the vendor isn't trying to make it hard to download, you should always be able to convert to PDF. But PDF to HTML is very hard or impossible.
- adrian_b 5mo ago
  In any technical/scientific document I do not want to increase or decrease the size of any element, e.g. of one of the fonts. You only want to do an overall proportional zoom, when needed. A well-designed document page has appropriate size ratios between various kinds of texts, formulae, tables and images, which should not be corrupted by changing the size of a single element. The pages where the author has not formatted them adequately are ugly and hard to understand, which is what you typically see when this kind of content is written as HTML/EPUB documents, which are rendered non-deterministically. Lazy writers may like HTML, but readers who must read and search through vast amounts of technical documentation do not like it. There are many good PDF readers that are adequate for reading and searching even huge documents, but I have never seen any tool that works acceptably for EPUB/HTML big documents, which is not surprising because no tool can compensate the fact that the writer of the document did not design the layout of the pages carefully.
  - Worf 5mo ago

mcdonje 5mo ago

EPUB is the ebook standard, outside of Amazon-land, so it has staying power in its space. I think it would be good for the ecosystem if it broke containment and got tooling in enough places to challenge PDF.

jkscm 5mo ago

slighlty disagree with this. A fixed page layout has it's own advantages. The reason we have more high quality pdf readers than epub readers is probrably connected to the format itself. PDF readers usally are more more feature complete when it comes to stuff like annotations too.

Worf 5mo ago
My issue with EPUB readers is about features a PDF reader wouldn't even have. Small and annoying things like how much freedom I get when changing fonts and whatnot. I haven't had a need to use annotations. I guess that could be solved by EPUB editors, but I haven't tested any, apart from any text editors after unzipping the EPUB.
- kuekacang 5mo ago
  Somewhat agree!. I think my main gripe is that there are no good-enough reader that: - without account integration - has good ux Even some of the okay ones, most are, as tantacurl may say, janky.

adrian_b 5mo ago

HTML and EPUB work not great, but very badly for scientific or technical papers or books. No two readers render them alike, and they typically are much uglier and more difficult to use than books (sometimes even the same book) in PDF, DJVU or ODT formats. I read a very large quantity of technical documentation and I always avoid EPUB and HTML like the plague. I use such formats only when there is no alternative. On Linux, mupdf is a decent EPUB reader, which is very fast and it usually does a better job at formatting pages than most other EPUB readers that I have tried on Linux. For fast navigation and searching, especially in technical documentation with hundreds or thousands of pages, it is very useful for the document to be well partitioned into pages and the page layouts to be well designed, like for a printed book, even if this may seem unnecessary for a document stored in a computer. HTML and EPUB documents are seldom divided in uniform pages and the position of various elements, like tables or figures can vary between readers or even with the same reader in different circumstances, so when you search various things you are slowed down in recognizing them, because they may not be in the position where you have seen them previously. Moreover, in HTML and EPUB documents, depending on the reader, the size ratios between various elements may be inappropriate, making the pages ugly and/or hard to understand. All the defects of HTML and EPUB documents are caused by the fact that the writer of the document normally does not take full responsibility for the appearance of the pages, delegating this to the browsers/readers, which seldom do a good job for scientific/technical documents full of formulae, tables and figures. This may be fine for normal Web pages, but it is not acceptable for technical and scientific documents. In theory, one could design carefully HTML pages and the associated CSS files, to be rendered deterministically, but I have encountered very rarely such documents.

Worf 5mo ago
I understand your point that you want a fixed presentation layout and pagination. I prefer to be able to responsively resize the document and to follow the ToC instead of pages. I've yet to see documentation that's thousands of pages long that doesn't include a very detailed ToC. For me remembering "section 8.3.16.2" is better and makes more sense than remembering "page 1292". I've had to read scanned math books years ago and I remember using some PDF reader to put bookmarks that correspond to the ToC, so I'd put "2.5.1.2 - Theorem about X" in the sidebar. That's how I was able to actually go back and forth easily. With just pages it would've taken me tens of seconds to locate a theorem (or lemma, proof, definition, whatever). And it was a dense book, so I had to constantly go back and reread stuff. But I agree that PDFs can, and often do, have ToCs, too. > the size ratios between various elements may be inappropriate I can't recall having this issue on websites or on EPUBs. What kinds of elements are we talking about? HTML and CSS are pretty good at keeping sizes from what I've seen. I agree that there are many EPUB readers, most of them very unpolished. And perhaps there aren't EPUB readers that are good at everything, yet. For formulas, MathML and other tech has been satisfactory. I was able to find this basic math paper arXiv uses as a demo for their HTML papers: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1910.06709 https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1910.06709 It doesn't have figures, but the math is rendered perfectly. I can easily remove the "justify" style and increase and decrease the letters. If it was a long paper, it would've been nice to have a clickable ToC, but most EPUBs have one. I think that right now most EPUB readers and some HTML renderings are bad, but I believe they'll get better.