What is the PDF format good for? Nothing (2006)

PDF is good for creating documents which are decently accurate at preserving the form of the content, both in print and on paper, while being accessible on a wide range of platforms.<p>Sure, there are formats better for print presentation. There are also formats that are better at on-screen presentation. But PDF offers a decent tradeoff and can be opened, dare I say, on any device.<p>The article is being simplistic. It completely fails to address the main advantage of PDF, which is access on all platforms.

I don&#x27;t think it&#x27;s fair to say that preserving page structure and formatting is never a good idea. For example, at least one good use for PDFs is sheet music&#x2F;tabs. Formatting is obviously important here as it tends to lose meaning without it, but equally as important is the page structure and per-page nature of reading vs scrolling. As a (hobbyist) musician, when I&#x27;m playing an instrument, I don&#x27;t have any free hands to scroll with, so it&#x27;s important to me that I don&#x27;t have to do it very often.

I happen to work in an industry (intl shipping) where we scan billions of PDF daily, and I have no clue, how would we share docs with all the parties involved ... &#x27;sanely&#x27; ... if it were not for PDF, TIFF isn&#x27;t good either .. PDF docs are like 3kb-10kb ... other than physical scan of papers ... however &#x27;generated PDF docs&#x27; are 5kb at best.

It seems that the post was written in 1997 [1], with some parts added in 2005 [2].<p>The author is generally a computer science professor with some idiosyncratic (at least for the current time) opinions. Though I enjoyed the classes I attended with him a few years ago and some of his points I found quite convincing.<p>For example, in the class on stack based languages (forth &amp; postscript mostly) he also showed how using PS instead of PDF allows him to put results from the analysis in the source code of papers and generate the plots from them. I try to mimic this in my PDFs by adding shortened links to the source and data for each plot (example: [3]) as I&#x27;ve often been annoyed with figures in papers that omit crucial information on what they show.<p>[1]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19971016211209&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.complang.tuwien.ac.at&#x2F;anton&#x2F;why-not-pdf.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;19971016211209&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.compl...</a><p>[2]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20051231210211&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.complang.tuwien.ac.at&#x2F;anton&#x2F;why-not-pdf.html" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;web.archive.org&#x2F;web&#x2F;20051231210211&#x2F;https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.compl...</a><p>[3]: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;CfuYeOO.png" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;i.imgur.com&#x2F;CfuYeOO.png</a>

It&#x27;s a widely used <i>standard</i>: The more people who can open and use PDF files, the more people who will prefer to create and distribute PDF files. Whether the PDF format is better or worse than the alternatives doesn&#x27;t factor into people&#x27;s decision to use it.

21 years after, nobody cares about postscript.<p>This ends up being a good example of how decent tech fails if not backed up by reasonable commercial strategy. In the world we live in, it&#x27;s not enough to be good - heck, you don&#x27;t even need to be good at anything, just be good at marketing it.

This post - and every technical post on the internet - needs a date stamp.<p>Please never blog or post anything without putting a date on it.

&quot;...Acrobat reader for DOS that I have is dog slow...&quot;<p>We&#x27;re done here.

While I think the author makes some good points about the PDF format itself, this article is painfully outdated with many complaints about Acroreader and Netscape which are no longer remotely relevant.<p>Though the article does serve as an interesting time capsule. Kinda shows you how the more things change the more stay the same.

So one of the common uses for pdf is filling in digital forms, typically published by your government. I didnt even see this addressed in the gigantic rant by author.<p>Instead they complained about Actobat Reader for DOS is slow and other random anecdotial evidence, none which imo supports his claim that pdf is good for nothing.

PDF is mostly a subset of Postscript. It improves on Postscript in terms of speed and security.<p>In contrast to Postscript, it is not a Turing-complete programming language. What&#x27;s left is a bunch of commands placing graphics objects on pages.<p>That means PDF viewers cannot be DoSed in an obvious way by placing infinite loops in the document.<p>It also means that any page in a document can be directly rendered, without rendering the rest of the document first. That&#x27;s not possible with Postscript, because Postscript documents are programs that need to executed from the start.

Math! Math typesetting is still a huge problem -- same as back in 1997 with a few improvements here and there.<p>I do remember the days when postscript was far more of a default, or dvi -- there were people who refused to use pdf format at that time. Almost no one has stuck with that battle.<p>Standardized, high-quality math typesetting in html has still just not quite happened although it&#x27;s improving continuously.

Pagination is better that scrolling on mobile devices. I often prefer it on a desktop screen as well.<p>I read PDFs all the time on my iPad Pro. They fit the form factor perfectly.

Acrobat Reader is dog slow on...DOS? When is this published? The title should have [year].

Can we get a title update to 1997? (First published year)