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The story of the PDF (2018)
- netfl0 6y agoThere was a period of time when I thought PDF’s days were numbered. That was over a decade ago. There is now first class support in many applications. I don’t think it’s going anywhere.
- gogopuppygogo 6y agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF It became open source in 2008 so it’s definitely here to stay.
- geogra4 6y agoIt is a format that doesn't know what it wants to be. Is it an image? Text? Vector graphics? Electronic forms? How about all of the above.
- marcinzm 6y agoIt's basically digital paper and since paper can be all those things so can PDFs.
- giantDinosaur 6y agoCan paper run ad-tracking analytics scripts though? ;-)
- eat_veggies 6y agocan pdf?
- easton 6y agoGiven that PDFs can embed JavaScript, they can embed ad tracking software, yes. And Linux VMs. And a port of WinAmp.
- randomdude402 6y agoI didn't know they could embed javascript. That's horrifying.
- sjy 6y agoI don’t think any of that is possible with the JavaScript APIs exposed (if any) by common PDF readers. I’ve tried to do useful things with JavaScript in a PDF and failed utterly. https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32597283/can-javascript-running-within-a-pdf-access-the-domain-it-was-downloaded-from https://stackoverflow.com/questions/32597283/can-javascript-...
- SSLy 6y agoPaizo uses JS to trigger map layers (for RPG products)
- jcynix 6y agoTracking is one possible problem. The other is, that JavaScript can modify the document itself, so a part of a contract for example might print out differently depending on conditions. That's why PDF/A for archiving was created which disallows various components, cf. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF%2FA https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF%2FA
- mpweiher 6y agoFortunately many PDF viewers don't run them.
- marcinzm 6y agoHave a single copy of the paper in a place with a sign in sheet and now you're tracking everyone who looks at it.
- inquirerofsorts 6y ago> all of the above You forgot malware https://www.thesecurityblogger.com/distributing-malware-inside-adobe-pdf-documents/ https://www.thesecurityblogger.com/distributing-malware-insi...
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- jbverschoor 6y agoIt renders properly. HTML doesn't even know if it wants to be an application or a document.
- Finnucane 6y agoIt's pretty much essential to the publishing industry. Until we actually stop printing books, we'll be using pdfs.
- axiolite 6y agoThere's nothing special about PDF. Only reason PDF is useful is because it's easy to convert to/from Postscript and Adobe was pushing out a free viewer for PDFs but not Postscript files. That, and the difference in fees they chose to charge on the formats.
- Finnucane 6y agoThat may be true, but it is so deeply embedded into publishing workflows now it would be hard to dislodge.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoSome in the publishing industry have actually moved to HTML - O'Reilly comes to mind.
- Finnucane 6y agoFor online and authoring, sure. If they print the books, it gets converted to a pdf.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoWhich is what pdfs should be (mostly) restricted to.
- qubex 6y ago> there was a period of time when I thought PDF’s days were numbered And indeed you are correct! A time shall arise, sooner or later in the future, a moment when the last PDF file is created, as well as a moment when a PDF is consulted for the last time. Depending on your definition of format obsolescence, this might be well beyond its expiry date, or it might actually mark the moment of death. (Let’s forget that the Apple lineage of OSes derived from Display PostScript-using NeXTstep such as OS X [latterly macOS], iOS, iPadOS, watchOS and tvOS all use PDF as a mechanism for drawing primitive sources onto the screen.) Anyway... after that long preamble, statements like these remind me very much of Goldfinger’s famous quote, and in honour of Sean Connery’s passing yesterday I will allow myself to elucidate: Bond: “Do you expect me to talk?” Goldfinger: “I expect you to die!” The latter being a very reliable expectation, but one that can sometimes take a lot longer to come true than the utterer might have in mind when they make the assertion.
- alister 6y agoI'm thankful PDF won, because otherwise I think it would have been Microsoft Word. There was a time when papers, books, resumes, contracts, etc. almost always came as Word. Does anyone else remember getting a book as preface.doc, chap1.doc, chap1a.doc, chap2.doc, subchap2a2.doc, and so on, and a mess of jpegs and gifs and trying to figure out how it had to be assembled, and discovering something was missing, or that one chapter was newer than the others. That's one reason I really like PDF -- it's one file, self-contained, and linear. On the other hand, I really wish it was more diff'able. If for example a credit card company changes one word in their terms & conditions PDF, it seems like 90% of document changes at the binary level. I know that PDF diff tools exist, but there must be tremendous internal complexity in the PDF format for tiny changes to alter the whole structure.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rahimnathwani 6y ago"but there must be tremendous internal complexity in the PDF format for tiny changes to alter the whole structure." Imagine a simple file format that doesn't support text wrapping, but allows you to specify elements as (x, y, s) where (x, y) specify a position, and s is a string that will be written left-to-right, truncated at the edge of the screen. That's a simple file format, right? But inserting a word somewhere early in that document would change the string within every element in the rest of the paragraph. And maybe move the y position of every element later in the document. That would be a PITA to diff. Even more so if the document has more than one column.
- ternaryoperator 6y ago>I'm thankful PDF won, because otherwise I think it would have been Microsoft Word. Well, probably Microsoft XPS, which was actually a fairly well designed format. But Microsoft didn't have the fight in them to really push it as a competitor to PDF. In part, I suspect b/c it's hard to justify investing a lot of money in your competing document standard as there is not much revenue you can derive from it. As of 2018, Microsoft no longer bundles XPS support in Windows 10.
- Sniffnoy 6y agoOriginal article, without so many obnoxious ads: https://tedium.co/2018/02/27/pdf-file-format-history/ https://tedium.co/2018/02/27/pdf-file-format-history/
- ffpip 6y agohttps://ublockorigin.com https://ublockorigin.com
- hyiltiz 6y agoIt is a pity that DjVu[0] wasn't even mentioned; an open format that was superior to PDF in many ways[1], including better optimization, efficient storage. [0] http://djvu.org/ http://djvu.org/ [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu
- adamnemecek 6y agoIt's crazy that Yann LeCun was involved in the creation.
- ar7hur 6y agoYes, Yann and another machine learning celebrity: Leon Bottou!
- msla 6y agoDjVu is a great format for scanned images, which is its primary use-case, but I'm not seeing where you can have actual, selectable text in a DjVu document, like you can with PDF and PostScript. It seems like it's all images.
- adrian_b 6y agoI have not read the specification, but the DJVu format must have a way to store the plain text besides the images and that way is frequently used. I do not remember ever reading a DJVu file that did not allow searching and selecting the text, while PDF files which do not allow those, because they store only the scanned images, are quite frequent.
- jwilk 6y ago> 3.3.2 Hidden text > Every DjVu image optionally includes a hidden text layer that associated graphical features with the corresponding text. The hidden text layer is usually generated by running Optical Character Recognition software. This textual information provides for indexing DjVu documents and copying/pasting text from DjVu page images. I copied that text from the DjVu spec, which is in the DjVu format.
- asperous 6y agoThe only problems with PDFs are that they are misused. They are amazing at exactly reproducing a printed document, and far superior to a jpg at doing that because it is vector, searchable, can contain links, etc If you've ever tried to read a math textbook in ebook format on a ipad then switched to pdf, you can see how pdf shines.
- asperous 6y agoOne issue I have with the "archival" aspect of pdfs discussed in the article, is you are archiving a picture of something, not the blueprint. So much pain and time will be spend on machine learning models extracting semantic meaning from pdfs that could have been saved if archivers were to also save source formats or machine readable data. But for some reason, publishers have an allergy to submitting those so its a lost cause.
- kuharich 6y agoPast comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19819789 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19819789
- watersb 6y agoIn the early summer of 1995, the Mac community was fairly small. But it dominated the publishing industry. At the conference for Macintosh network administrators, we were all super excited about this World Wide Web thing. The potential for a while new paradigm for information publishing, from creation to distribution, for in-house corporate operations or mass media companies, it was a new medium that would make paper obsolete. The Adobe reps were visibly exasperated by all this. They had solved this problem, years ago. You could click on any element of a PDF, and go to a different place in the current document, or open any other file on your computer. Powerful tools for graphical interactive PDF creation and editing. Even the ability to trigger AppleScript actions in response to mouse or keyboard events... The Web, by comparison, was primitive and naive. Why was it getting all the attention?
- qubex 6y ago• Because one was proprietary, the other was not. • Because one was top heavy, the other was not. • Because one was a document format shared between an application that creates ne one that displays, the other was a whole server/protocol/client stack. • Because one would insist on rigidly paginating it’s content as output by the generating application, while the other defined content that would be streamed to your client and allow it to adapt the content to your display and reflow it’s (admittedly primitive-looking) text & cetera. • Because one was designed for use within corporations to distribute documents, while the other was intended to allow collective authorship beyond corporate confines and that this consumer/researcher technology would later seep back into the corporate domain and possibly screw up their plans. Another way to look at it: if the Adobe folks were angsty, irritable, annoyed, or otherwise flustered, it’s probably because they knew (some?) of the above (and perhaps more) and realised that they were going to have a fight on their hands.
- saagarjha 6y agoHyperCard did some of those things!
- unnouinceput 6y agoThis has something of a misleading argument in it in the form that PDF is the "basis" for document world. PDF is not the basis. Lemme explain: for each format there is a basis and there is the most used format. For sound that's .WAV / .MP3; for pictures that's .BMP / .JPEG (or .PNG if you're a purist). And for documents that's .RTF / .PDF. You see a PDF is not the absolute basis, it's just the most convenient trade between usability and fidelity. Nobody except snobs wants pure .WAV files for their preferred songs and everybody uses .MP3 instead. If you want the absolute purest form of a document, you use .RTF My 2 cents.
- 867-5309 6y agoif only .PDFs could easily be converted back to a useful raw format. parsing them is a bloody minefield, irregularly stuffed with proprietary metadata galore
- qubex 6y agopdftotext -layout
- jfk13 6y agoSometimes works well, depending on the structure and content of the PDF. Other times it's hopeless. Certainly not a general solution. Indeed, there isn't one, because the design of PDF allows far too many things that can't be reliably deciphered back to the source data. That's why Adobe is throwing all their ML at it, to try and come up with something that guesses near enough right more of the time.
- 867-5309 6y agoas with the hundreds of other converters, it probably will produce varying results
- unnouinceput 6y agoPDF is a printing format, not an editing format - hence the trouble when you want to convert it back to an editable document. It's the same as going back from .JPEG to .BMP, you'll never get back your original pixels.
- gumby 6y agoPDF has been bad news, as it embodies assumptions from an earlier age: how paper works. I want to read flowable text that adapts to my screen and my size needs. I want to be able to reliably select and extract text. I don’t need something that apes an archaic IO system (printer+paper) with all its flaws and, when on scree, none of its advantages.
- Gibbon1 6y agoI use pdf's for data sheets. Last thing I want is flowable text. Also 25 years on in selecting and extracting text from html is hot garbage.
- gnicholas 6y agoAgreed. Adobe's recently-announced [1] Liquid Mode for mobile devices is a step in the right direction. 1: https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/adobes-liquid-mode-uses-ai-to-automatically-redesign-pdfs-for-mobile-devices/ https://techcrunch.com/2020/09/23/adobes-liquid-mode-uses-ai...
- mongol 6y agoSeems to be a feature of their reader rather than an improvement of the format. I am unsure if that is actually in the right direction
- gnicholas 6y agoThat is my understanding also. It would certainly be better if it were part of the format, but I imagine they're very concerned with backward compatibility. So perhaps this is the best we can hope for from Adobe.
- pjmlp 6y agoI still use lots of paper and PDF is the ideal format for it. There are other formats for flowable text in screens.
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- gautamcgoel 6y agoAny have a recommendation for a good FOSS PDF reader for Linux.
- SSLy 6y agozathura with the mupdf engine, evince (if you can stomach poppler's speed), sumatrapdf inside wine.
- bastawhiz 6y agoMan, this reminded me of XPS (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification), which I haven't thought about in ten years. Glad it never won.
- varispeed 6y agoWhen I first got a computer magazine in a PDF format in the late 90s, I knew this is going to be the future. It looked so slick on my CRT monitor and I've been looking at pages, zooming, zooming out, just for the sake of it. Whenever I open a PDF file my mind goes back in time and relives these moments of joy.
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