The story of the PDF (2018)

I&#x27;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&#x27;s one reason I really like PDF -- it&#x27;s one file, self-contained, and linear.<p>On the other hand, I really wish it was more diff&#x27;able. If for example a credit card company changes one word in their terms &amp; 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.

It is a pity that DjVu[0] wasn&#x27;t even mentioned; an open format that was superior to PDF in many ways[1], including better optimization, efficient storage.<p>[0] <a href="http:&#x2F;&#x2F;djvu.org&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;djvu.org&#x2F;</a> [1] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DjVu" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;DjVu</a>

One issue I have with the &quot;archival&quot; aspect of pdfs discussed in the article, is you are archiving a picture of something, not the blueprint.<p>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.

In the early summer of 1995, the Mac community was fairly small. But it dominated the publishing industry.<p>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.<p>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...<p>The Web, by comparison, was primitive and naive. Why was it getting all the attention?

There was a period of time when I thought PDF’s days were numbered. That was over a decade ago.<p>There is now first class support in many applications. I don’t think it’s going anywhere.

Original article, without so many obnoxious ads: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tedium.co&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;pdf-file-format-history&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;tedium.co&#x2F;2018&#x2F;02&#x2F;27&#x2F;pdf-file-format-history&#x2F;</a>

PDF has been bad news, as it embodies assumptions from an earlier age: how paper works.<p>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.

Past comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19819789" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=19819789</a>

This has something of a misleading argument in it in the form that PDF is the &quot;basis&quot; for document world. PDF is not the basis.<p>Lemme explain: for each format there is a basis and there is the most used format. For sound that&#x27;s .WAV &#x2F; .MP3; for pictures that&#x27;s .BMP &#x2F; .JPEG (or .PNG if you&#x27;re a purist).<p>And for documents that&#x27;s .RTF &#x2F; .PDF. You see a PDF is not the absolute basis, it&#x27;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<p>My 2 cents.

The only problems with PDFs are that they are misused.<p>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<p>If you&#x27;ve ever tried to read a math textbook in ebook format on a ipad then switched to pdf, you can see how pdf shines.

When 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&#x27;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.

Man, this reminded me of XPS (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Open_XML_Paper_Specification" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.m.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Open_XML_Paper_Specification</a>), which I haven&#x27;t thought about in ten years. Glad it never won.

Any have a recommendation for a good FOSS PDF reader for Linux.