

In defense of PDF - techdog
http://asserttrue.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-pdf.html

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halo
I'd dispute the entire premise of the article - I have not heard anyone say
that PDF is a legacy format. It's quite clearly the preferred format for
putting physical documents into a digital format.

~~~
pavel_lishin
I've heard plenty of people say that PDF _should_ become a legacy format.
Maybe I've been doing it wrong all these years, but PDF is a pain in the ass
to work with from a code point of view.

~~~
someone_here
What are you doing with it?

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pohl
I love PDF. Just last night I synced the revised report on Haskell 98 (as a
PDF) over to my iPad and stayed up late reading it in iBooks. Having the
format baked into a platform helps, I'm sure (anybody remember the days they
called quartz "display PDF"?) so anybody who only knows about Acrobat Reader
is forgiven for the bad impression they have of the format.

~~~
rufo
Indeed. PDF is a great experience on OS X, and a decent one on iOS. (While its
main UI is rather cluttered, I feel GoodReader does a better job with PDF than
iBooks, solely for the margin cropping and table of contents support.)

~~~
dunham
I found that switching pages in GoodReader was pretty painful, but this seems
to have been fixed in the most recent release. (The main UI is a little weird,
too, but it gets the job done.)

iBooks PDF is decent, especially for a 1.0 product. They do need to add TOC
support and 2-up would be nice. But my biggest issue with iBooks is
organizational, with only 30 books, my collection is hard to manage. (I'd like
to keep separate lists of "to read", reference, "already read", etc.)

Ideally, Apple would also add PDF/epub podcast support for magazines. I
imagine Saveur (PDF) or a SciFi magazine (epub short stories) automatically
feeding into iBooks.

epub is good for novels and the like, but I appreciate PDF for stuff where
formatting matters. (e.g. Autumn Omakase
<http://www.tastingmenu.com/autumnomakase/default.htm> ) PDF is also helpful
for stuff that iBooks epub can't handle well, like technical documents.

On OSX, I really like Preview - it's a dream to use. My only complaint is that
it's a little sluggish with JBIG/JPeg2k PDFs. (Scans of old books.) I think
it's possible to render these pdf files as quickly as djvu files, but Apple
hasn't yet made the necessary optimizations (rendering jpeg2k at reduced
resolution).

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ekidd
The author argues that PDF isn't obsolete, because it's an excellent
replacement for paper forms that need to be reproduced exactly. This is true.
But I think these paper forms are themselves becoming obsolete as
bureaucracies switch to online forms.

We use PDFs for a different purpose. We use them as a intermediate format when
processing and archiving documents from other software. We need to support
100+ file formats, and we need to accurately preserve the underlying
appearance.

PDF is great for this kind of "visual capture," because it's the most common
format that can preserve arbitrary formatting and graphics. And unlike TIFFs
or PNGs, PDFs can be searched and highlighted, because they optionally contain
the full text of the document.

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ecaron
The Free Software Foundation agrees with this, too. That's why their #1 "High
Priority Free Software Project(s)" is GNU PDF:
[http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-
projects/index_html/#g...](http://www.fsf.org/campaigns/priority-
projects/index_html/#gnupdf)

The problem isn't with PDF itself, but more PDF viewers/creators are such a
super-vast-minority behind a single company's product that it is hard to
imagine it as anything other than a bad/doomed technology. But hopefully GNU
PDF can change that (and Gnash too).

~~~
naner
_The problem isn't with PDF itself, but more PDF viewers/creators are such a
super-vast-minority behind a single company's product [...] But hopefully GNU
PDF can change that_

I don't see how. They are behind all the other free software PDF
implementations. GhostScript even has a _new_ renderer (mupdf) that is ahead
of GNU PDF.

~~~
ecaron
In the same way that Internet Explorer's 98% market share was problematic, and
that the web is a better place with competition/awareness of browser choice.
As it is now, few consumer know of options other than Reader. (And anybody
who's had to use FoxIt for professional-PDF use knows it isn't a working
solution for designers.)

~~~
rufo
FWIW, I think a majority of Mac users don't actually install Adobe Reader,
since Preview handles them natively and fantastically for nearly all purposes.

~~~
eru
Also evince runs on Windows, now. Works well.

------
eru
Adobe should have kept PostScript (or the clear-text based first versions of
PDF.) Shortening PostScript, not to speak of going the binary route, was
premature optimization.

.PS.GZ is usually smaller than .PDF, try it!

