7 ms·

History of the PDF

102 points by dwynings 3y ago

Alifatisk 3y ago
I like PDF, It does one thing and it does it well. I just wish there was free alternatives to work with PDFs. I can't believe something so well adopted by everyone is still closely controlled by Adobe. You can't a free tool that offers features close to Adobe Acrobat, there is none. You have to download multiple tools that each offers their own feature close to Acrobat.
ggm 3y ago
"read this PDF online" goes to a 404. Perhaps un-ironically? If you have the PDF you can read it!
jimjimjim 3y ago
PDF is the worst document format, apart from all the other formats. When developing software to read or process PDFs the PDF spec can always deliver a jump scare like no other spec. But to give it credit it broke Microsoft's stranglehold on documents, not completely, but back in the mid 2000s organizations no longer required you to submit things as word documents anymore.
- jansan 3y ago
  Adobe file formats never had the reputation of being easy to work with. I spent some time with the CFF font format, and I can say it was not a pleasure.
- balder1991 3y ago
  But is the word XML format really bad nowadays?
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  That's the thing. Every PC, Mac, Android, iPhone can display PDF files. You can capture all elements of a website on one. It just works.
  - Findecanor 3y ago
    > It just works. As long are you're using the one true program: Adobe Acrobat. A few years ago I did the mistake of printing a PDF shipping label from a web browser ... which left a critical bar-code blank.
dave8088 3y ago
Here’s a link that works: https://www.sensible.so/blog/history-of-the-pdf https://www.sensible.so/blog/history-of-the-pdf
- dang 3y ago
  Thanks! I've changed to that from https://www.sensible.so/history-of-the-pdf-pdf https://www.sensible.so/history-of-the-pdf-pdf above.
korp 3y ago
This doesn't make the best coffee table book.
tonyedgecombe 3y ago
>In 2020, Nielsen made the case again, writing, “After 20 years of watching users perform similar tasks on a variety of sites that use either PDFs or regular web pages, one thing remains certain: PDFs degrade the user experience.” Good luck saving a HTML version of any modern web page and being able to read it in twenty or thirty years time. HTML just wasn't designed for that.
- eviks 3y ago
  Good luck doing the same in PDF with embedded javascript, which is the stuff that's not designed, not HTML
- wslh 3y ago
  I used to click "Print" (macOS) and save to file in (ironically for this article) PDF... does it work for you?
  - ______ 3y ago
    An issue with this is that the print CSS of most websites is an afterthought. While it’s possible to alter the design with @media print as well as the page breaks, few websites do this. You are often left with broken layouts, empty pages, or nonsense page breaks.
    - whartung 3y ago
      For some insane reason, one of the stores we use that you can order online and pickup at the store, when you try to print the page with the barcode, the barcode does not print. We end up having to take a screenshot and print that. It's just utterly baffling, especially for this specific use case.
- kps 3y ago
  HTML was; Javascript wasn't.
jtvjan 3y ago
I'm so impressed by the design of this PDF file. It's amazing that they put in so much effort to design what comes down to just an informational article.
- dwynings 3y ago
  Yeah, we tried to have some fun with it.
davidthewatson 3y ago
I thought being emancipated from word docs was freedom until I realized the suffering brought on by a left field version of wkhtmltopdf no one uses but someone built and distributed via pamac AUR. In software, Hybridization is Postmodernism.
dblitt 3y ago
For some reason, this page embeds the PDF as an iframe. The actual PDF is at https://19971168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/19971168/History%20of%20the%20PDF.pdf https://19971168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/199711...
- ralferoo 3y ago
  It's so they can add their help / advertising at the bottom right of the screen.
  - whartung 3y ago
    This is a nit for me in the PDF experience. The browsers I use tend to have no difficulty in rendering the PDF in the browser, but every now and again, you click on a PDF and now it's in your Downloads folder and opening up your OSs PDF viewer. 99% of the time, those PDFs are as disposable as HTML pages that I'd rather not manage and intern on my machine.
  - dwynings 3y ago
    It was actually because I didn't want to link to a hubspot url and webflow only supports uploads up to 10mb.
ralferoo 3y ago
So, reading the article is a bit weird. It's clear there's an anti-PDF bias from the start, with the implicit assumption that everybody hates reading PDF files. Actually, I don't because I get to read a well formatted document. They even say that it should only be used as a format for things to be printed, never as a document for people to read on a computer... and yet this is clearly meant to be read once on a screen and not printed out. It also contains a hypertext link to their company that obviously wouldn't work if printed, and they embed it in an iframe, because they expect people to be reading it online. But towards the end, you start to see the real objection to PDFs - that it's not always easy to extract text automatically from a document. It mentions a few of the issues - extra spaces, not enough spaces, hidden text that gets extracted because it's off-page, fonts that are designed to obfuscate the internal text, e.g. re-arranging characters or splitting glyphs up in strange ways, etc. It's worth noting that with the exception of the spaces, these techniques are used deliberately to stop people extracting text or the copyrighted fonts from the document. It's not at all obvious from the document itself, but if you click on the link to the company, all becomes clear. The reason this company is saying that all these things are problems with PDF is because their company is in the business of extracting raw text from PDF. Ignoring all the designers efforts to place things in specific places to make things pleasing for a human to read, etc... They don't want any of that. They just want to extract the raw text so they can data mine it and sell that as a service.
- eviks 3y ago
  Except it's a poorly formatted document because it's not formatted to fit screens of different width, which is huge (phones are a thing) Also you haven't solved another huge fail of the most basic digital workflow - copy&paste - by pointing at the motivation of the author since "except spaces" ruin it for everyone, not just professional data extractors
- merb 3y ago
  Actually most pdfs are formatted in a good way and it’s easy to extract text. The stupid stuff is just copy encryption, which is just a stupid feature (because pdf viewers can ignore it) I have no idea why somebody hates pdfs for extracting data, when stuff like doc,xls (the old format) is clearly way worse. Pdf sometimes has its quirks but the 2.0 version clearly cleans up a lot of the messes
davidthewatson 3y ago
PDF shares a common property with computational complexity and robotics: the magical world of software is no longer free from physics, as if it ever was. Software has reciprocity in creating these illusions and destroying them.
phkx 3y ago
Statisticians beware: It‘s about the Portable Document Format.
- anticensor 3y ago
  As opposed to probability distribution functions, I guess?
contrarian1234 3y ago
Are there any real alternatives? I tried to make a conference poster with SVG - using Inkscape - and it was minor disaster that rendered differently in different programs/browsers, with some features entirely broken but I don't know of a third option..
- martin_a 3y ago
  Well, this is exactly why PDF was invented and is doing its job so well. To preserve a desired layout and very specific information on how something has to be outputted. That comes with downsides, yes, but at its core it's just working fine. edit: Third option would be to render your content as an image, but that comes with its own downsides.
  - contrarian1234 3y ago
    expect I don't feel many programs are working in PDF natively except for Adobe products. It's always just an export target, or you "print to PDF" So to me it kinda looks like the format is lacking I also don't know much about it, but I assume it's not easy to generate programmatically. While for instance generating an SVG diagram/image is generally pretty trivial
- signaru 3y ago
  Microsoft tried with XPS which is a zipped XML format, pretty much like MS Office 2007+ files. To Adobe's credit, they made PDF an open standard around the time XPS came out. Maybe it's a combination of being there first, many files already in PDF, and finally making the format open which made PDF win.
  - mdaniel 3y ago
    The LOC's write-up is informative, I think: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000514.shtml https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0005... They do say "please don't" as far as their "LC preference"[1] but then later in the document have nice things to say about the format being just .zip and .xml so its introspection and recovery options are much larger than "welp, hope pdf2text still exists in 2040" 1: they have a Recommended Formats Statement: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/ https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/ which currently is published in html and pdf with a "Get Adobe Reader" button on the page, which I feel is dangerously misguided advice
mobilio 3y ago
Fun fact first version for PC was DOS version: https://winworldpc.com/product/acrobat-reader/1 https://winworldpc.com/product/acrobat-reader/1
- HenryBemis 3y ago
  I remember seeing this software on the university's computers, an acrobat.. and I was thinking.. WHAT is that software that I see in EVERY PC? I didn't know what PDF was at the time. I grew up with an Amstrad PC1512 (oh, and a family too) but never had to use Acrobat. Only GW-Basic, Zaxxon, Bubble Bobble, Defender of the Crown, and other super useful software ;) The most 'complicated' software I used was Volkswriter!
DeathArrow 3y ago
PDF as a format is bad when you want to edit or extract text. But do we have an alternative to it that is as portable?
- FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago
  That's because it's intent is for output rendering and not editing. There source document(s) are what is used for editing.
martin_a 3y ago
For everybody complaining about the non-transformative character of PDF: There are several PDF standards out in the wild. In the graphic industry we mainly use PDF/X files. These are very solid and precise in defining the layout and how objects are rendered. For archiving purposes there's another standard, it's called PDF/A. Part of PDF/A is that you must be able to transform its text content back to Unicode. So, if you're looking into being able to convert PDFs back and forth, you should probably use PDF/A. PDF/X files will drop that support to maintain the desired appearance as close as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
- ogurechny 3y ago
  PDF/A is a joke of a “standard” that does almost nothing that is promised on the cover. It is just a subset of PDF with limits on variable options like color representation, frozen at some arbitrary point in time, probably because people working with digital archives realized that they couldn't reach the moving goal, and implement the ever growing list of features. We may only expect programs producing PDF/A files to be less “creative”, and produce straightforward markup, but it's not guaranteed at all, because PDF/A doesn't address any of the real core format issues.
- FinnKuhn 3y ago
  I would also add that .pdfs are often not meant to be transformed. They are the digital equivalent of a book, which no one complains about not being able to edit. If you wanted to have a document you could edit you don't use .pdf, but something else before you convert export it as an .pdf. The same is true about images. No one complains about .jpg not being editable, as any sane person would use a photoshop or similar file and only export the final product.
divbzero 3y ago
From page 12 of the PDF: > Comments on places like HackerNews refer to it as “one of the worst file formats ever produced” [1], “soul-crushing” [2], and something that “should really be destroyed with fire” [3]. I found the source for [1] and [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22474460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22474460 but couldn’t identify the source of [2].
herodotus 3y ago
After working on PDF document reconstruction for more than a decade, I often fantasized about inventing a cleaner and simpler alternative. After all, there are only three kinds of objects in PDF: shapes, images and glyphs. But it is all those little details that will get you in the end. A line - all you need is a coordinate and a length, right? No: is it solid, what is its width? Is its end point anchored on the left most part of the visible line, or does the thickness spread out from the anchor point? And is the end square of curved? If curved, what are the parameters of the curve? Are both ends the same? On it on it goes. And don't event get me started on glyphs... PDF is a remarkable creation. It has some notable weaknesses, such as the fact that its color channel for images does not include alpha, and thus needs masks, but the fact that it covers so much visual complexity in a relatively compact form is just amazing. (BTW: Its graphics model is strictly from Adobe Postscript, but PDF content streams are not programs.) One thing that bugged me while reading this article was the use of the definite article ("the PDF"). Since PDF is an acronym for "Portable Document Format" there may be a grammatical case to be made for the "the", but no one says "the HTML" or "the NASA" and so on.
vlark 3y ago
You can tell the writers and designers hate the PDF format because they made the damn thing so difficult to read, layout-wise. They went 1990s PageMaker/QuarkXpress crazy here.

102 points by dwynings 3y ago

I like PDF, It does one thing and it does it well. I just wish there was free alternatives to work with PDFs. I can't believe something so well adopted by everyone is still closely controlled by Adobe. You can't a free tool that offers features close to Adobe Acrobat, there is none. You have to download multiple tools that each offers their own feature close to Acrobat.

ggm 3y ago

"read this PDF online" goes to a 404. Perhaps un-ironically? If you have the PDF you can read it!

jimjimjim 3y ago

PDF is the worst document format, apart from all the other formats. When developing software to read or process PDFs the PDF spec can always deliver a jump scare like no other spec. But to give it credit it broke Microsoft's stranglehold on documents, not completely, but back in the mid 2000s organizations no longer required you to submit things as word documents anymore.

jansan 3y ago
Adobe file formats never had the reputation of being easy to work with. I spent some time with the CFF font format, and I can say it was not a pleasure.
balder1991 3y ago
But is the word XML format really bad nowadays?
HenryBemis 3y ago
That's the thing. Every PC, Mac, Android, iPhone can display PDF files. You can capture all elements of a website on one. It just works.
- Findecanor 3y ago
  > It just works. As long are you're using the one true program: Adobe Acrobat. A few years ago I did the mistake of printing a PDF shipping label from a web browser ... which left a critical bar-code blank.

dave8088 3y ago

Here’s a link that works: https://www.sensible.so/blog/history-of-the-pdf https://www.sensible.so/blog/history-of-the-pdf

dang 3y ago
Thanks! I've changed to that from https://www.sensible.so/history-of-the-pdf-pdf https://www.sensible.so/history-of-the-pdf-pdf above.

korp 3y ago

This doesn't make the best coffee table book.

tonyedgecombe 3y ago

>In 2020, Nielsen made the case again, writing, “After 20 years of watching users perform similar tasks on a variety of sites that use either PDFs or regular web pages, one thing remains certain: PDFs degrade the user experience.” Good luck saving a HTML version of any modern web page and being able to read it in twenty or thirty years time. HTML just wasn't designed for that.

eviks 3y ago
Good luck doing the same in PDF with embedded javascript, which is the stuff that's not designed, not HTML
wslh 3y ago
I used to click "Print" (macOS) and save to file in (ironically for this article) PDF... does it work for you?
- ______ 3y ago
  An issue with this is that the print CSS of most websites is an afterthought. While it’s possible to alter the design with @media print as well as the page breaks, few websites do this. You are often left with broken layouts, empty pages, or nonsense page breaks.
  - whartung 3y ago
    For some insane reason, one of the stores we use that you can order online and pickup at the store, when you try to print the page with the barcode, the barcode does not print. We end up having to take a screenshot and print that. It's just utterly baffling, especially for this specific use case.
kps 3y ago
HTML was; Javascript wasn't.

jtvjan 3y ago

I'm so impressed by the design of this PDF file. It's amazing that they put in so much effort to design what comes down to just an informational article.

dwynings 3y ago
Yeah, we tried to have some fun with it.

davidthewatson 3y ago

I thought being emancipated from word docs was freedom until I realized the suffering brought on by a left field version of wkhtmltopdf no one uses but someone built and distributed via pamac AUR. In software, Hybridization is Postmodernism.

dblitt 3y ago

For some reason, this page embeds the PDF as an iframe. The actual PDF is at https://19971168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/19971168/History%20of%20the%20PDF.pdf https://19971168.fs1.hubspotusercontent-na1.net/hubfs/199711...

ralferoo 3y ago
It's so they can add their help / advertising at the bottom right of the screen.
- whartung 3y ago
  This is a nit for me in the PDF experience. The browsers I use tend to have no difficulty in rendering the PDF in the browser, but every now and again, you click on a PDF and now it's in your Downloads folder and opening up your OSs PDF viewer. 99% of the time, those PDFs are as disposable as HTML pages that I'd rather not manage and intern on my machine.
- dwynings 3y ago
  It was actually because I didn't want to link to a hubspot url and webflow only supports uploads up to 10mb.

ralferoo 3y ago

So, reading the article is a bit weird. It's clear there's an anti-PDF bias from the start, with the implicit assumption that everybody hates reading PDF files. Actually, I don't because I get to read a well formatted document. They even say that it should only be used as a format for things to be printed, never as a document for people to read on a computer... and yet this is clearly meant to be read once on a screen and not printed out. It also contains a hypertext link to their company that obviously wouldn't work if printed, and they embed it in an iframe, because they expect people to be reading it online. But towards the end, you start to see the real objection to PDFs - that it's not always easy to extract text automatically from a document. It mentions a few of the issues - extra spaces, not enough spaces, hidden text that gets extracted because it's off-page, fonts that are designed to obfuscate the internal text, e.g. re-arranging characters or splitting glyphs up in strange ways, etc. It's worth noting that with the exception of the spaces, these techniques are used deliberately to stop people extracting text or the copyrighted fonts from the document. It's not at all obvious from the document itself, but if you click on the link to the company, all becomes clear. The reason this company is saying that all these things are problems with PDF is because their company is in the business of extracting raw text from PDF. Ignoring all the designers efforts to place things in specific places to make things pleasing for a human to read, etc... They don't want any of that. They just want to extract the raw text so they can data mine it and sell that as a service.

eviks 3y ago
Except it's a poorly formatted document because it's not formatted to fit screens of different width, which is huge (phones are a thing) Also you haven't solved another huge fail of the most basic digital workflow - copy&paste - by pointing at the motivation of the author since "except spaces" ruin it for everyone, not just professional data extractors
merb 3y ago
Actually most pdfs are formatted in a good way and it’s easy to extract text. The stupid stuff is just copy encryption, which is just a stupid feature (because pdf viewers can ignore it) I have no idea why somebody hates pdfs for extracting data, when stuff like doc,xls (the old format) is clearly way worse. Pdf sometimes has its quirks but the 2.0 version clearly cleans up a lot of the messes

davidthewatson 3y ago

PDF shares a common property with computational complexity and robotics: the magical world of software is no longer free from physics, as if it ever was. Software has reciprocity in creating these illusions and destroying them.

phkx 3y ago

Statisticians beware: It‘s about the Portable Document Format.

anticensor 3y ago
As opposed to probability distribution functions, I guess?

contrarian1234 3y ago

Are there any real alternatives? I tried to make a conference poster with SVG - using Inkscape - and it was minor disaster that rendered differently in different programs/browsers, with some features entirely broken but I don't know of a third option..

martin_a 3y ago
Well, this is exactly why PDF was invented and is doing its job so well. To preserve a desired layout and very specific information on how something has to be outputted. That comes with downsides, yes, but at its core it's just working fine. edit: Third option would be to render your content as an image, but that comes with its own downsides.
- contrarian1234 3y ago
  expect I don't feel many programs are working in PDF natively except for Adobe products. It's always just an export target, or you "print to PDF" So to me it kinda looks like the format is lacking I also don't know much about it, but I assume it's not easy to generate programmatically. While for instance generating an SVG diagram/image is generally pretty trivial
signaru 3y ago
Microsoft tried with XPS which is a zipped XML format, pretty much like MS Office 2007+ files. To Adobe's credit, they made PDF an open standard around the time XPS came out. Maybe it's a combination of being there first, many files already in PDF, and finally making the format open which made PDF win.
- mdaniel 3y ago
  The LOC's write-up is informative, I think: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000514.shtml https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0005... They do say "please don't" as far as their "LC preference"[1] but then later in the document have nice things to say about the format being just .zip and .xml so its introspection and recovery options are much larger than "welp, hope pdf2text still exists in 2040" 1: they have a Recommended Formats Statement: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/ https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/ which currently is published in html and pdf with a "Get Adobe Reader" button on the page, which I feel is dangerously misguided advice

mobilio 3y ago

Fun fact first version for PC was DOS version: https://winworldpc.com/product/acrobat-reader/1 https://winworldpc.com/product/acrobat-reader/1

HenryBemis 3y ago
I remember seeing this software on the university's computers, an acrobat.. and I was thinking.. WHAT is that software that I see in EVERY PC? I didn't know what PDF was at the time. I grew up with an Amstrad PC1512 (oh, and a family too) but never had to use Acrobat. Only GW-Basic, Zaxxon, Bubble Bobble, Defender of the Crown, and other super useful software ;) The most 'complicated' software I used was Volkswriter!

DeathArrow 3y ago

PDF as a format is bad when you want to edit or extract text. But do we have an alternative to it that is as portable?

FuriouslyAdrift 3y ago
That's because it's intent is for output rendering and not editing. There source document(s) are what is used for editing.

martin_a 3y ago

For everybody complaining about the non-transformative character of PDF: There are several PDF standards out in the wild. In the graphic industry we mainly use PDF/X files. These are very solid and precise in defining the layout and how objects are rendered. For archiving purposes there's another standard, it's called PDF/A. Part of PDF/A is that you must be able to transform its text content back to Unicode. So, if you're looking into being able to convert PDFs back and forth, you should probably use PDF/A. PDF/X files will drop that support to maintain the desired appearance as close as possible. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

ogurechny 3y ago
PDF/A is a joke of a “standard” that does almost nothing that is promised on the cover. It is just a subset of PDF with limits on variable options like color representation, frozen at some arbitrary point in time, probably because people working with digital archives realized that they couldn't reach the moving goal, and implement the ever growing list of features. We may only expect programs producing PDF/A files to be less “creative”, and produce straightforward markup, but it's not guaranteed at all, because PDF/A doesn't address any of the real core format issues.
FinnKuhn 3y ago
I would also add that .pdfs are often not meant to be transformed. They are the digital equivalent of a book, which no one complains about not being able to edit. If you wanted to have a document you could edit you don't use .pdf, but something else before you convert export it as an .pdf. The same is true about images. No one complains about .jpg not being editable, as any sane person would use a photoshop or similar file and only export the final product.

divbzero 3y ago

From page 12 of the PDF: > Comments on places like HackerNews refer to it as “one of the worst file formats ever produced” [1], “soul-crushing” [2], and something that “should really be destroyed with fire” [3]. I found the source for [1] and [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22474460 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22474460 but couldn’t identify the source of [2].

herodotus 3y ago

After working on PDF document reconstruction for more than a decade, I often fantasized about inventing a cleaner and simpler alternative. After all, there are only three kinds of objects in PDF: shapes, images and glyphs. But it is all those little details that will get you in the end. A line - all you need is a coordinate and a length, right? No: is it solid, what is its width? Is its end point anchored on the left most part of the visible line, or does the thickness spread out from the anchor point? And is the end square of curved? If curved, what are the parameters of the curve? Are both ends the same? On it on it goes. And don't event get me started on glyphs... PDF is a remarkable creation. It has some notable weaknesses, such as the fact that its color channel for images does not include alpha, and thus needs masks, but the fact that it covers so much visual complexity in a relatively compact form is just amazing. (BTW: Its graphics model is strictly from Adobe Postscript, but PDF content streams are not programs.) One thing that bugged me while reading this article was the use of the definite article ("the PDF"). Since PDF is an acronym for "Portable Document Format" there may be a grammatical case to be made for the "the", but no one says "the HTML" or "the NASA" and so on.

vlark 3y ago

You can tell the writers and designers hate the PDF format because they made the damn thing so difficult to read, layout-wise. They went 1990s PageMaker/QuarkXpress crazy here.