6 ms·

As a matter of urgency PDF needs to go the way of Flash, same goes for TTF. Those that know, know why.

by throwaway840932 1y ago

internetter 1y ago
I think a PDF 2.0 would just be an extension of a single file HTML page with a fixed viewport
- mdaniel 1y ago
  I presume you meant that as "PDF next generation" because PDF 2.0 already exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_PDF#ISO_32000-2:_2020_(PDF_2.0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_PDF#ISO_32000-2:_20... Also, absolutely not to your "single file HTML" theory: it would still allow javascript, random image formats (via data: URIs), conversely I don't _think_ that one can embed fonts in a single file HTML (e.g. not using the same data: URI trick), and to the best of my knowledge there's no cryptographic signing for HTML at all It would also suffer from the linearization problem mentioned elsewhere in that one could not display the document if it were streaming in (the browsers work around this problem by just janking items around as the various .css and .js files resolve and parse) I'd offer Open XPS as an alternative even given its Empire of Evil origins because I'll take XML over a pseudo-text-pseudo-binary file format all day every day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification#Comparison_with_PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification#C... I've also heard people cite DjVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu as an alternative but I've never had good experience with it, its format doesn't appear to be an ECMA standard, and (lol) its linked reference file is a .pdf
  - LegionMammal978 1y ago
    As it happens, we already have "HTML as a document format". It's the EPUB format for ebooks, and it's just a zip file filled with an HTML document, images, and XML metadata. The only limitation is that all viewers I know of are geared toward rewrapping the content according to the viewport (which makes sense for ebooks), though the newer specifications include an option for fixed-layout content.
- karel-3d 1y ago
  you can "just" enforce pdf/a ...well there is like 50 different pdf/a versions; just pick one of them :)
  - cylemons 1y ago
    That and only commercial pdf libraries support PDF/A. Apperantly, it is much harder than regular PDF so open source libs dont bother.
    - karel-3d 1y ago
      I am currently building (as a side-project) an easy converter from PDF to PDF/A (PDF/A-3b)... a negative being that it is mostly based on Ghostscript, which is Affero GPL (mainly because Ghostscript makers also make money selling commercial licenses); and that in case of weird font, I just convert all fonts to bitmaps ( https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708479 https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708479 ). It's not done yet though... I am going through verapdf PDF/A testsuite ( https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-corpus https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-corpus ) and still catching bugs
    - cess11 1y ago
      As a producer of PDF files I mainly work with PDF/A. It's not particularly hard, just need to embed some information regarding colour space and fonts. I use PDFBox for this purpose, it's Apache licensed.
voidUpdate 1y ago
And what about those that don't know?

As a matter of urgency PDF needs to go the way of Flash, same goes for TTF. Those that know, know why.

internetter 1y ago

I think a PDF 2.0 would just be an extension of a single file HTML page with a fixed viewport

mdaniel 1y ago
I presume you meant that as "PDF next generation" because PDF 2.0 already exists https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_PDF#ISO_32000-2:_2020_(PDF_2.0) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_PDF#ISO_32000-2:_20... Also, absolutely not to your "single file HTML" theory: it would still allow javascript, random image formats (via data: URIs), conversely I don't _think_ that one can embed fonts in a single file HTML (e.g. not using the same data: URI trick), and to the best of my knowledge there's no cryptographic signing for HTML at all It would also suffer from the linearization problem mentioned elsewhere in that one could not display the document if it were streaming in (the browsers work around this problem by just janking items around as the various .css and .js files resolve and parse) I'd offer Open XPS as an alternative even given its Empire of Evil origins because I'll take XML over a pseudo-text-pseudo-binary file format all day every day https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification#Comparison_with_PDF https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_XML_Paper_Specification#C... I've also heard people cite DjVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu as an alternative but I've never had good experience with it, its format doesn't appear to be an ECMA standard, and (lol) its linked reference file is a .pdf
- LegionMammal978 1y ago
  As it happens, we already have "HTML as a document format". It's the EPUB format for ebooks, and it's just a zip file filled with an HTML document, images, and XML metadata. The only limitation is that all viewers I know of are geared toward rewrapping the content according to the viewport (which makes sense for ebooks), though the newer specifications include an option for fixed-layout content.
karel-3d 1y ago
you can "just" enforce pdf/a ...well there is like 50 different pdf/a versions; just pick one of them :)
- cylemons 1y ago
  That and only commercial pdf libraries support PDF/A. Apperantly, it is much harder than regular PDF so open source libs dont bother.
  - karel-3d 1y ago
    I am currently building (as a side-project) an easy converter from PDF to PDF/A (PDF/A-3b)... a negative being that it is mostly based on Ghostscript, which is Affero GPL (mainly because Ghostscript makers also make money selling commercial licenses); and that in case of weird font, I just convert all fonts to bitmaps ( https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708479 https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=708479 ). It's not done yet though... I am going through verapdf PDF/A testsuite ( https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-corpus https://github.com/veraPDF/veraPDF-corpus ) and still catching bugs
  - cess11 1y ago
    As a producer of PDF files I mainly work with PDF/A. It's not particularly hard, just need to embed some information regarding colour space and fonts. I use PDFBox for this purpose, it's Apache licensed.

voidUpdate 1y ago

And what about those that don't know?