
The Editable PDF Initiative - ddb
https://editablepdf.org/
======
laurent123456
> PDF has long become the de facto format for exchanging print-oriented
> documents on the Web, and for a good reason: it works, and reliably so!

Perhaps it's that way _because_ it's read-only? If PDF files had to be
generated in such a way that they can later be edited, things would get a lot
more complex and probably less reliable.

Also it feels like it's the wrong way to go about it, because no matter what
PDF editing will never be as powerful as a proper text editor. So it would be
the wrong tool to collaborate on a document (because as soon as you want to do
something more advanced with layout, images, etc. you probably can't). Maybe
it's good if you want to quickly amend a contract before sending it, but then
you need to remember that your .doc is no longer the latest version.

Basically a PDF document shouldn't be the source of truth for document editing
as that would lock you to the wrong format.

~~~
pge
While this is mostly true, it should not be relied on. If the PDF is produced
from a text document or report generator, then the text as well as the charts
are easy to edit with any text editor (only requires decompressing the PDF
first). Obviously different if the document is a scanned image, but just
saving a Word doc into PDF does not make it a read-only file. The benefit of
PDF is that it is (as the name suggests) portable, and one knows that the
recipient will see exactly what was sent. With a Word or Powerpoint,
formatting can show up different on different machines, fonts may not be
available, etc.

~~~
pdpi
It's read-only in the same sense as a jpeg or an mp3 are read-only — it's a
format designed for publishing, rather than editing, data.

~~~
hvidgaard
When you print a word document to PDF the actual text, placement, and fonts
are all embedded in the pdf. It may have been designed for publishing, but
it's pretty simple to edit text in it.

~~~
darau1
Yes, and following this logic, anything can be called editable. A binary file
is 'editable' with enough work. The point is that PDF is the format used to
disseminate private information to multiple and disparate parties with the
confidence that will all receive the same informtion, and cannot (reasonably)
change that document.

That's why it's used in marketing for things like lookbooks and elsewhere for
things like contracts, that are read-only by design and should never be edited
by anyone but the entity that wrote it in the first place.

~~~
pge
In the case of PDFs, though, it is almost trivial to edit. Uncompress the PDF,
and then search in a text editor for the sentence you want to change and edit
it. Uncompressing takes one command, and after that it is almost as easy as
editing a word doc (in your favorite editor, search and replace the text you
want to change)

It's a little more complicated but not difficult to edit charts.

~~~
darau1
Trivial for you, impossible for the likes of marketing execs, lawyers, etc. As
far as most laymen are concerned PDF's are completely unchangeable, and even
those that know you _can_ edit it, don't know how to do it themselves and tend
to ask someone else. That's in my experience anyway.

------
kccqzy
Meh. Not being easily editable is a feature, not a bug.

Sometimes you want to send out a finalized document and want to make 99% of
the users unable to edit them. That's what PDFs are for. Imagine lawyers
needing to send out a finalized contract. Or a graphic designer sending out
the finalized design. Or an electronic book that has gone through the work of
the author, the editor, and the publisher and needs no more changes. PDFs give
an air of permanency and stability when so many other digital formats are
malleable.

~~~
klint
That objection, and others, are addressed in the project FAQ[1]. It's already
possible to open and edit a PDF in various applications.

[1] [https://editablepdf.org/faq/](https://editablepdf.org/faq/)

>But isn’t the whole point of PDF that you can’t edit it? No. The fact that
standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident than a feature, as
PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form documents needed to be
transmitted. Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware:
minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial —
therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify
that your PDFs have not been tampered with. More extensive edits, however, are
more difficult, as they require the document’s logical structure to be
automatically detected, and this is an error-prone task.

[...]

>Are you sure we need such a editable PDF format? I believe one of the most
important benefits of PDF is its concrete, solid state. The idea of Editable
PDF stems from a real-world need to improve the efficiency in the way that we
work with documents. Today, the only editable file formats are those native to
the applications that generated documents, and none of these formats
guarantees the layout to be preserved in the same way as PDF. Furthermore,
despite improvements in compatibility, using a native file format still often
requires the recipient to be using the same software (and often the same
version) of the application, which may not be available.

PDF’s largest asset, its rock-solid visual presentation, will remain, and
editable PDFs will be backwardly compatible with the current installed base of
PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader and Preview.

~~~
Angostura
> The fact that standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident
> than a feature, as PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form
> documents needed to be transmitted.

I disagree with this - I was an IT journalist when PDFs came out and all the
blurb at the time was centred around the advantage of being able to create a
document and know that it could be displayed by anyone, irrespective of
machine, OS etc while retaining visual fidelity.

PDF only became a thing in the print production world quite a bit later. For
many years, you were making sure your printer got the QuarkXpress Files _and_
all the high-res asset files collected together into a single folder and
zipped up.

~~~
tonyedgecombe
PDF was based on PostScript, a system that was created for digital printers.
The big selling point of PostScript was that your output would look the same
whether you were printing on an Apple LaserWriter or a Linotype.

~~~
Angostura
Indeed. Postscript is great for printers. The fact that the PDF was created
_in addition_ was because a comparable system was needed for human eyeballs.

------
pdpi
PDF is a publishing, rather than an editing format. It belongs in the same
bucket as .mp3 and .jpg, rather than the .doc and .psd bucket.

This is not about how easy or how hard it is to modify a pdf, it's about the
intended purpose. The fact that it's meant for publishing means we get to
optimise it as such, both in terms of simplicity of the format itself, and in
terms of the tools that interact with it. This makes consistent-ish rendering
much easier. The features that would enable the format to be "editable" are
also the sort of features that make consistency hard.

~~~
blunte
Consistency can be solved with hashing and cryptographic signatures.

The user story here is that PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out,
and that poses a problem for non Mac users or users without sufficient
technical skill.

And since you reference mp3 and jpg, you surely know that both formats can be
modified in ways that many people will not recognize as modifications. It just
pushes the skill level up a bit. But there's always a technically capable
person available for hire to modify one of the "permanent" formats you
mention.

~~~
brokenmachine
>PDFs get sent around as forms to be filled out, and that poses a problem for
non Mac users

Why is that a problem? I'm pretty sure there's a PDF reader app for every
major platform.

~~~
blunte
Not all readers allow annotations or changes, so forms cannot be filled out on
the computer. Instead they have to be printed, hand filled in, then scanned
again.

------
ropiwqefjnpoa
I'm not going to say the PDF format is perfect, but I do like sending out
documents knowing that in general they are going to be opened by a reader in a
presentation format. I'd rather they not be opened by an editor, where my
viewers are immediately invited to start making changes like a word doc. I
suppose having them open initially in a non-editable mode would work, Acrobat
functions that way.

~~~
klodolph
It’s phenomenal for so many use cases it’s absurd. I have a huge stash of PDF
files—tons of articles that I’ve saved so I can refer to them later.
Meanwhile, half the links I have to blog posts are dead, if not more. I know
that I’ll be able to read these PDFs 10 years from now, or 20 years from now.
Plenty of them are 10 or 20 years old.

PDF is great for:

\- Archiving. It’s self-contained and will work 20 years down the line.

\- Math. Anything with equations.

\- Printing.

I’ve tried various techniques to archive web pages with varying degrees of
success. With PDFs I don’t need to think about it.

~~~
ropiwqefjnpoa
Yeah, now that nearly everything prints or saves to pdf format, I have little
use for a direct editor. Just make sure my PDF's always open and always look
the same.

What I would like, is to make PDF's easy to markup with highlighting, circles,
comments etc. Currently, even in Acrobat, it's not very intuitive.

~~~
scarejunba
Interesting. I recall saving as MHTML when I was young but it looks like
that's not a thing now.

~~~
yeahtruck
Internet explorer 5.5, or whatever, supported mhtml flawlessly, but then,
Mozilla, or Netscape, it was called, didn't. So unless you're on ie 5.5 for
life you're skits out of luck. Mhtml was flawless afaik but nothing else than
ie 5.5 or whatever supported it. Mozilla which was Netscape sure did not.
mhtml was the best thing. Except whenever using anything but ie 5.5 that
is/was.

------
IvanK_net
I have been working on a PDF editor for several years. It is available inside
my photo editor [https://www.Photopea.com](https://www.Photopea.com) (press
File - Open - choose a PDF file). People open 7 000 PDF files in it every day.

Often, a PDF contains just a single raster bitmap with the whole content
rasterized. Also, text is often converted to vector shapes, which also makes
it non-editable (as text). But it can open / save PDFs from Google Docs and
other editors quite well.

------
piadodjanho
The PDF file format is anachronous.

When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the
format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The
format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user.

Also, the file was made with the assumption it was suppose to be printed, not
shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing the
data.

A funny trivia. The PDF is suppose to be read from the end of file. That's why
some documents need to fully downloaded before they can display the first
page. Of course, nowadays most PDF are linearized and load, at least, the
first page right away.

Over the years specification got so complex it became very hard to implement a
minimal editor, viewer, parser or generator. If the format was simpler, it
would be possible to make "save as PDF" more accessible.

I've other issues with the typesetting and the way color is handled (it has a
printer first approach), but I think this post got too long already. I just
want to point out the spec supports so many pointless features such drawing in
3D space, movies, audio, HTML support, etc.

Finally, I don't understand why most people are against a revision on the PDF
format despite clearly having very little knowledge on how it works. I think
multi person edition of the same entry with some version control can be
useful. By the way, the format kinda let many people edit the document at
once, as long as they are not working in the same part.

~~~
kccqzy
> When the format was created, computers only had a few KBs of RAM. Yet the
> format should be capable of editing documents with thousand of pages. The
> format solves this issue by delegating the memory management to the user.

That's a good decision. Make the file format versatile and powerful. Don't
constrain it by the limitations of contemporary hardware.

> Also, the file was made with the assumption it was supposed to be printed,
> not shared. It is easier to hide parts of the document instead of removing
> the data.

I agree it's made with the assumption of being printed, but that's part of the
appeal—preserving visual fidelity of how the document looks. You can't send
people a docx and expect them to see the exact same thing on their screen down
to every detail.

And no it's not difficult to remove data. If you know exactly what to remove,
it is quite easy to remove things. To remove text, find the Tj or TJ
operators, remove them and their arguments. To remove an image, find the Do
operator (occasionally BI, ID, EI) and remove it. You might have to perform
decompression before doing that. For images, you might have to run another
pass to delete the referenced object. But all these are all very easily
automated.

> Over the years specification got so complex it became very hard to implement
> a minimal editor, viewer, parser or generator. If the format was simpler, it
> would be possible to make "save as PDF" more accessible.

The reason "save to PDF" is difficult to implement from scratch is not because
of its complicated specification. Indeed parsers are quite easy to write. The
real reason "save to PDF" is difficult to implement is because PDF wants
visual fidelity; that comes at the price of specifying where exactly text
should be placed, all the way from how paragraphs are flowed to how kerning of
the letter is to be handled. Most applications do not care about these
details. Most developers hardly have any interest in understanding line-
breaking algorithms or interpreting font files to produce the right offsets
and glyphs (think ligatures). These things are, rightfully, way beyond the
business domain of typical applications and beyond the knowledge of typical
developers.

~~~
piadodjanho
Given the constraints of the time when the format was conceived, the pdf
format has a great design. I think, embedded designers should have a quick
look on the PDF format to learn some tricks on how reduce unneeded memory
accesses -- it basically implement a directory inside a file.

With the entry removal example, I was trying to show the format was not meant
not to be shared. I know it is possible to remove data in other ways, and that
probably every modern editor removes the data correctly. But it was not how
the _format itself_ deals with it. Of course, hiding entries with the flag had
others uses such only print only the pages you currently working on without
having to rescan the whole file.

I agree most devs don't have interest in learning how to do typesetting. But
also, typesetting is quite complex by itself, specially when dealing with non
western language. Luckily, projects such Harfbuzz (nowadays, hb is used even
my emacs) makes it a lot easier.

Like I said in my original post, the format is anachronous. I don't think the
format is intrinsically bad, I just think the format is not right for your
time. I think we can do better nowadays.

PS: I've been thinking, it would be pretty cool to talk with the engineering
team that worked on the first spec, and actually know what they were thinking
back them and what they would change in it nowadays.

------
BEEdwards
I think it's funny that the top two comments of this post are diametrically
opposed, yet I kind of agree with both of them.

The PDF is a terrible format, yet if I'm sending an email with an attachment I
want you to see exactly how it looks on my computer then I'm exporting to PDF.

However if your book is only available as a pdf I'm probably going to skip it.

PDF is good for short things, a contract maybe. The best use case is forms
which this doesn't really talk about but seems to address, the web has
basically solved it, but there are times you want to send people a form to
fill out that you don't want the formatting to be go wacky on, but still need
to be editable.

PDF can do this but isn't good at it, this seems to take that not good and
make it good.

~~~
enriquto
> However if your book is only available as a pdf I'm probably going to skip
> it.

Wait, what format do you expext a book to be? I mostly skip any book that is
not on pdf

~~~
Terretta
Something that reflows when you change text size, font family, or page
orientation.

~~~
enriquto
I am not sure that we can call a text that has not yet been typeset a "book".
In any case, do you know any such format that does not completely botch
equations? The closest I can imagine is html with mathjax.

~~~
aurbano
eBook formats can do that, but they may struggle with math notation - I
haven't read any mathematical work on ebooks.

~~~
enriquto
I once did. I'm still in therapy to recover from the trauma.

------
mung
If you find PDF painful because you can't reflow text or edit it, newsflash:
you are using the wrong format. Industries that use PDF extensively: legal and
printing. Neither of them want to be able to change documents.

To preempt: I work within printing, yes there are tools to hack into PDFs and
make certain alterations or fixes, but it's to get you out of a bind only,
it's not a normal healthy workflow.

------
jstewartmobile
This is a mistake. The hard-to-edit, assembly-language-like nature of PDF is a
feature, not a bug.

~~~
smacktoward
The FAQ addresses this objection:
[https://editablepdf.org/faq/](https://editablepdf.org/faq/)

~~~
jimueller
The FAQ doesn't address it completely in my opinion.

> Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits
> in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you
> need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your
> PDFs have not been tampered with.

That's not really the point that it can't be edited, the value to me is that
the sender has confidence that it will look the same to the receiver as the
sender.

~~~
pacaro
And then of course there is the deliberately edit hostile way that PDFs can be
(ab)used, by printing a document and then scanning it to PDF. In my experience
some lawyers like this because it means that to suggest edits you have to
retype or OCR entire paragraphs

~~~
kccqzy
I used to do a variation of this by converting all text to outlines in a PDF.
It will even deter more people from editing the document. This also saves
paper, and text will remain sharp (although slightly different because
operating systems have different heuristics when it comes to rasterizing text
and graphics).

------
9nGQluzmnq3M
I'm going to add an unsolicited plug for PDFEscape, which effectively lets you
"edit" any PDF: [https://www.pdfescape.com/](https://www.pdfescape.com/)

It's an online service that lets you upload PDFs, then edit fields, add text,
upload and paste images like your signature, etc. Perfect for filling out
tedious paper application forms without having to deal with printing &
scanning.

I have no connection other than as a satisfied user, and in fact I have no
idea how they make money, since the free mode features suffice for every use
case I've had.

~~~
scrollaway
I use Master PDF Editor ([https://code-
industry.net/masterpdfeditor/](https://code-industry.net/masterpdfeditor/)).
It's not free, but it's not terribly expensive either and you can probably get
it expensed depending on your job.

It also does PDF editing _perfectly_. I really hope there will be some open
source version of it at some point. Or that someone's working on one.

------
lxgr
The proposed way to achieve editability sounds like it is inherently at odds
with the page description model of PDF, which is in turn exactly what gives it
its stable output on different platforms.

A PDF renderer basically needs to be able to rasterize fonts and paint glyphs
on a page/screen – that's it. Layout, spacing and even kerning are left to the
producing application.

The project mentions the lack of robustness inherent to web-based document
formats, but I'm afraid that any alternative would either be severely limited
in the range of achievable output documents or would end up reinventing the
wheel.

As an analogy: SVG has been around for a while, and yet we still use PNGs and
I don't see them going away anytime soon.

Maybe what we really need is just more widespread support of ePub, and maybe
some extensions for more "document-like" (instead of book-like) functionality
in editors for it, and potentially support for an embedded rendered PDF for
layout stability?

------
burtonator
The fact that PDF is immutable is a huge advantage.

In Polar we have taken the perspective that immutability is an advantage and
is going to be the basis for our group collaboration around documents.

We ended up building out annotations on top of PDF including text highlights
and area highlights which can then be commented on:

[https://getpolarized.io/docs/annotation-
sidebar.html](https://getpolarized.io/docs/annotation-sidebar.html)

Some of our users keep asking for editable documentation and I think the main
win here could just be using markdown which I'm thinking about adding.

The biggest thing that's needed though, for scientific use, is latex.
Fortunately, there are plenty of markdown implementations with latex support.

PDF is amazingly good for printing documents but honestly 90% of the complex
printing requirements aren't needed for regular use.

------
bloak
It sounds like what they want is a bit like what you get with a word processor
provided that everyone is using the same version of the same program on
identical systems, so you don't have the current situation of the layout
getting completely broken because different people have different fonts,
different paper sizes, and so on. In which case it's an interesting idea, but
they shouldn't call it "PDF".

Although it's an interesting idea, I suspect it will never work in practice
because word processing is just too complex. There are just too many complex
features that people expect to have available. Different implementations will
never be sufficiently compatible. Perhaps the solution is to bundle your
document with a WebAssembly binary of a particular version of LibreOffice? OK,
maybe you could separate the rendering functionality from the UI stuff, but
it's hard to see how in practice you could get documents to be editable and
rendered in the same way everywhere except by having everyone run the same
binary to do the rendering, and there will inevitable be a hundred versions of
that binary in use as new features get added.

------
lars-b2018
PDF is great because of its ability to present a print oriented view of any
type of information, packed in a document container in an efficient manner.
This is the design goal of the format. It is the source application's
responsibility to manage the semantics of the document scope, where edits to
the represented information can potentially cascade across the document in
non-trivial ways (think Excel for example). PDFs CAN be edited today, but
those edits are made by tools that just change the visual layout vs. the
information structures represented by the document. It's a rather difficult
problem to overcome if the PDF format now must contain rules about the
underlying information structure itself in order to maintain a consistent
representation in the document.

------
cm-t
As far I know, LibreOffice ('Draw' if i remember well) allow you to
graphically edit PDF (xourjal too, but not as rich as LibreOffice)

~~~
dwheeler
LibreOffice does let you create editable PDFs. They do this with a very
elegant solution, they embed the Open document format within the PDF. This
takes very little additional space, because the Open document format is
compressed. I think the LibreOffice Solution is quite elegant; Open document
format is already a standard, we don't need to create another one. And most
important, it works today, right now.

It would be a lot of effort to create a document format with the kind of
richness that PDF supports. I am dubious it would be worth it.

I think most people do not need an editable PDF in the first place, so this is
a minority problem. If you do want this, for most people there is already a
working solution... just store Open document format within PDFs.

------
nxpnsv
I prefer my PDF static, my meticulously edited LaTeX would be ruined by sticky
fingers. However, something I much would like is better copy to clipboard from
PDF. Non trivial input with tables and line breaks turns in to indecipherable
alphabet soup...

~~~
kccqzy
Check out [https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accsupp](https://www.ctan.org/pkg/accsupp)
which may be helpful. I've only used it a handful of times on small amounts of
text though.

~~~
nxpnsv
Cool, I’ll try it out. although typically I only need to copy other
researchers work.

------
diegof79
Adobe Illustrator files (.ai) are PDF compatible files, so you can view them
with a PDF reader like preview. The file still contains all the data to be
edited in AI. I guess it means that PDF format is already designed to hold
extra data that can be used for editing. But since pdf has many use cases, I
don’t think that it will change much for editing. You still need a tool
compatible with the original editor. However it will be interesting if docx
like ai files could be displayed in a pdf viewer, it will save a lot of time
dedicated to export/save as pdf.

------
VvR-Ox
Wow this is an awesome idea!

While editing PDFs on Linux for me was always connected with pain I also had
no joy using a plain macos for this. While the preview app is able to do some
things it cannot do others that matter.

I wanted to copy some text just yesterday - while I could select and copy it I
could not insert it as a text again in the same application.

To have to use some extremely overpriced adobe product for sometimes doing
tasks like this is overkill and really unnecessary.

To all the people who like PDF because you cannot edit it like you want: This
is the "obfuscation argument" because anyone who has the right tool or googles
for 10 min. can somehow edit PDF - it is just a real pain to do so most of the
time and the result may look like the patched overhead transparencies we saw
back in school in the earlier days.

------
superkuh
> If anyone constructed a PDF, which was itself blank but, via embedded
> JavaScript, loaded parts of itself from a remote server, people would
> rightly balk and wonder what on earth the creator of this PDF was thinking —
> yet this is precisely the design of many “websites”. To put it simply,
> websites and webapps are not the same thing, nor should they be. Yet the
> conflation of a platform for hypertext and a platform for applications has
> confused thinking, and led developers with prodigious aptitude for
> JavaScript to mistakenly see mere websites of text as a like nail to their
> applications hammer.

This quote was supposed to be an absurd hypothetical. But I guess we'll live
to see it in reality.

------
Meph504
I think this effort is misguided, they are attempting to take something that
has a specific purpose and does it well, and subvert it into something that
other applications and formats do well.

Pdf's aren't promoted as a portable editable format, but a portable, sharable,
and archival format.

Why promote PDF over ODF? Is the issues of document reflow, of an editable
document such an issue that they need to develop a new set of tools, and
change the structure of PDF to resolve the issue, if that is the case, it
seems they could contribute to resolving the issue in ODF?

------
runxel
Is this some weird kind of satire I don't understand?

Being read-only is the thing why we have PDF in the first place. If you want
to do changes, go back to the program where it came from. It's simple as that!
:)

~~~
tom_mellior
I've often needed to fill in PDF forms that were not using PDF's fillable form
fields, or to paste in a scanned signature. This is an important use case for
PDFs, and the people who send you these forms expect you to have a printer,
nice handwriting, and a scanner. Instead you can do the whole thing in
software, with only standard Ubuntu packages, but it can be painful for multi-
page documents: I typically have to use a sequence of pdfseparate/edit each
page in isolation/pdfjoin.

~~~
lxgr
PDFs specifically support the form use case (I remember using this a few times
for things like applying for credit cards etc). That was on Ubuntu too!

Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and
even fits the PDF model quite well.

~~~
tom_mellior
> PDFs specifically support the form use case

Yes, but the person creating the PDF must know this, and must know how to do
it with the software they have. In practice, many forms I've seen came out of
situations where this was not the case.

> Inserting a scanned signature is also not a problem at all these days, and
> even fits the PDF model quite well.

It's not a problem to open a one-page PDF in Inkscape or the Gimp and paste a
signature in there. That's what I said. It gets tedious with multi-page PDFs.
Do you have a better solution for this?

------
lawlessone
I don't want to give recruiters the ability to edit my CV.

------
specialist
PDF _forensics_ would be nice.

I used to write print production software. I'm no stranger to PDF.

I recently had to fill out a PDF form and send it back. It took me _way too
long_ to figure out the "form elements" were just images. I kept trying to use
different clients, thinking the content creator must have used some poorly
supported corner case of the PDF spec.

So I printed the frikkin PDF, wrote on it, scanned it, and sent it back.

What could be easier?

------
campfireveteran
At first, I thought it said _edible_ PDF, but I didn't think a closed format
would taste very good.

------
nuclx
That's like requesting that executables should include their source code.

------
Mikhail_Edoshin
Switch to XPS; it's a very clean format, much easier to work with than PDF.
And it's already supported by many apps, maybe not as widely as PDF, but
pretty well.

------
aabbcc1241
If you want consistent display and editable format, why not just use HTML with
standard css?

You also get enhanced accessibility. (I often need to reflow the pdf when
reading from mobile device)

------
Mikhail_Edoshin
Generally it's a very confusing initiative, very much like asking that text in
screenshots could stay editable and buttons clickable. Why?

------
okaleniuk
I misread it as edible PDF and thought wow! technology sure went a long way!

It would be nice to have an open standard for 3D food printing though.

------
tingletech
2018

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Ididntdothis
I would prefer a “kill PDF” initiative :). PDF is a terrible format for almost
all purposes it’s used for. It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes, is hard to parse
and loses a ton of information from source documents. I don’t think we could
have picked a much worse file format for widespread use.

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jolmg
What's a better format for displaying and printing documents consistently and
with selectable text?

> It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes

 _That_ is a feature. I expect my PDFs to display with pixel-perfect
consistency everywhere.

There _are_ other formats that adapt to screen sizes. HTML is good for that,
if we ignore how people break that with styling.

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microcolonel
The claim that text is selectable in PDFs is often dubious.

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klodolph
The problem is that text selection relies on the PDF generation to be done in
some kind of sensible fashion. There are so many ways to generate PDFs, and in
some of them, the actual text is mangled or its order is mangled before it
gets to the PDF generation step itself.

But in general, if you generate the PDF with an authoring tool like LaTeX or
InDesign, or if you print to PDF from a webpage or document, it's going to be
selectable in a sensible way.

