
Kill the PDF: Why it’s time to update or lose the format - bjoko
https://www.thedrum.com/news/2019/08/06/kill-the-pdf-turtl-explains-why-it-s-time-update-or-lose-the-format
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mimixco
PDFs definitely have problems but this "story" is an ad for a proprietary
format called Turtl.

Clciking through to the company's website and their example publications,
these are _much_ more difficult to navigate and confusing than PDFs. Users
will find it hard to work through a Turtl document in a linear way and hard to
figure out where something is inside the document so they can reference it
again.

After the time it took to get PDF made into an open standard, I don't think we
want to go back to a closed format that's owned by only one company and which
requires their cloud service to function.

~~~
weinzierl
The three limitations mentioned in the article are:

\- Too much scrolling

\- Creating a high-quality PDF requires the skill of a designer

\- Lack of performance data

PDFs definitely have problems but this "story" (besides being an ad) fails
even to convincingly cover them.

~~~
wahern
> Too much scrolling

macOS's Preview.app has great support for tables of content, which it displays
in a sidebar by default, permitting you to jump around easily. And of course
LaTeX and similar TeX-based frameworks do a great job of generating a proper
ToC automatically. So I actually find PDFs _better_ than web pages (even ones
with floating ToC panels) or any other format in terms of ease and consistency
of navigation.

Except... the PDF viewers in browsers don't support ToC display and
navigation. And typical MS Word PDF exports don't seem to generate ToCs,
judging by the fact that I rarely (if ever) see a Word-generated PDF with a
ToC--at least one that Preview.app displays. If Chrome, Mozilla, and Microsoft
put in just a _little_ effort here then the world of document sharing could be
immensely improved.

