A love-letter article detailing the success of the PDF file format. I felt that this was a good article as I reflected on the past 25 years of computer use and the PDFs I opened/created along the...
A love-letter article detailing the success of the PDF file format. I felt that this was a good article as I reflected on the past 25 years of computer use and the PDFs I opened/created along the way. It is incredible that it has been consistent over the years.
One thing that I have encountered recently is PDFs that have special logic built into it. I can't recall exactly, but I did face problems trying to build an editable form-filling PDF that seemed to be extremely lack luster if you didn't have the Adobe Pro software to create it. That might be one area where PDFs are starting to get bloated and not so universal as the history would lend itself.
Yeah, when they added Javascript to the PDF format, it no longer made any sense to me. Its entire format was designed to not have the problems that the Turing-complete PostScript had, which is...
Yeah, when they added Javascript to the PDF format, it no longer made any sense to me. Its entire format was designed to not have the problems that the Turing-complete PostScript had, which is that it's a computer program that needs to be run to render anything. That's very powerful, but also very dangerous. Now PDFs support Javascript and we're back to square 1. (Well, most don't use it, which is good, but you can't tell until you open one and it either doesn't work because your renderer doesn't support it, or it potentially does something malicious because your renderer does support it.)
I had to laugh when I was first exposed to JS in PDF via those More Purple More Better D&D sheets. Don’t get me wrong, those things rule. But it also takes upwards of 15 min to generate a new...
I had to laugh when I was first exposed to JS in PDF via those More Purple More Better D&D sheets.
Don’t get me wrong, those things rule. But it also takes upwards of 15 min to generate a new spell sheet on a 1st gen threadripper. I can only imagine the spiderwebs of awful JS one is forced to write to make a PDF like that work.
I used to have a love-hate relationships with PDFs years ago...I used to love that the experience for reading/viewing a doc was consistent across different platforms, OSes, etc. And i used to hate...
I used to have a love-hate relationships with PDFs years ago...I used to love that the experience for reading/viewing a doc was consistent across different platforms, OSes, etc. And i used to hate how i needed "special" software to be able to view/read the docs in the first place (vs. say an html file that any web browser or even text editor if i really was crazy enough to want to read the underlying html code - which was of course rare)...this was years ago, and now i have no strong feelings either way. Nowadays, as the article rightly states, so much software is easily available to view PDFs. I also do still see the value that PDFs bring with a consistent viewing experience. But nowadays i prefer web standards like html docs (or html-like docs like some markdown files, etc.) because the flexibility of the viewport is more important to me. By this i mean, if i'm viewing an html file on mobile, the mobile browser will size the text nicely for my eyes (unless the html file has been coded to be too pixel-specific, which is bad dev. practice in my opinion). I do not often have to pinch-to-resize content with html files, while PDFs mildly annoy me with the constant need to pinch to zoom, etc. Again, things are way better than they used to be, but i'm still a fan of web standards. Or, maybe if there was a single document standard that provided the benefits of both perspectives: the flexibility of html where the viewer can flex the experience; and, the choice of PDF-like "locked down"/consistent view for other audiences...Plus, is an open standard so as to avoid locking anyone out of freely using it ("free" as in both price and liberty of source and rights)...Then that would be the holy grail of document formats.
I get only a first-'graph tease of the article. Someone care to Pastebin (or PDF) the text? (One thing HTML has going against it is an increasing amount of paywalled / blocked content.)
I get only a first-'graph tease of the article.
Someone care to Pastebin (or PDF) the text?
(One thing HTML has going against it is an increasing amount of paywalled / blocked content.)
The amount of free articles you have read this month on Medium is stored in a cookie. So if you clear/delete all the cookies for medium.com in your browser, that will reset the count, then you can...
The amount of free articles you have read this month on Medium is stored in a cookie. So if you clear/delete all the cookies for medium.com in your browser, that will reset the count, then you can refresh the article page to read it in full. And if you also block medium.com cookies in your browser settings then you won't have to worry about going over the free article limit again.
(another common way to get around "harder" paywalls that don't offer free articles, like the New York Times or Washington Post, is to disable Javascript execution for that site.)
(another common way to get around "harder" paywalls that don't offer free articles, like the New York Times or Washington Post, is to disable Javascript execution for that site.)
A love-letter article detailing the success of the PDF file format. I felt that this was a good article as I reflected on the past 25 years of computer use and the PDFs I opened/created along the way. It is incredible that it has been consistent over the years.
One thing that I have encountered recently is PDFs that have special logic built into it. I can't recall exactly, but I did face problems trying to build an editable form-filling PDF that seemed to be extremely lack luster if you didn't have the Adobe Pro software to create it. That might be one area where PDFs are starting to get bloated and not so universal as the history would lend itself.
Yeah, when they added Javascript to the PDF format, it no longer made any sense to me. Its entire format was designed to not have the problems that the Turing-complete PostScript had, which is that it's a computer program that needs to be run to render anything. That's very powerful, but also very dangerous. Now PDFs support Javascript and we're back to square 1. (Well, most don't use it, which is good, but you can't tell until you open one and it either doesn't work because your renderer doesn't support it, or it potentially does something malicious because your renderer does support it.)
I had to laugh when I was first exposed to JS in PDF via those More Purple More Better D&D sheets.
Don’t get me wrong, those things rule. But it also takes upwards of 15 min to generate a new spell sheet on a 1st gen threadripper. I can only imagine the spiderwebs of awful JS one is forced to write to make a PDF like that work.
I used to have a love-hate relationships with PDFs years ago...I used to love that the experience for reading/viewing a doc was consistent across different platforms, OSes, etc. And i used to hate how i needed "special" software to be able to view/read the docs in the first place (vs. say an html file that any web browser or even text editor if i really was crazy enough to want to read the underlying html code - which was of course rare)...this was years ago, and now i have no strong feelings either way. Nowadays, as the article rightly states, so much software is easily available to view PDFs. I also do still see the value that PDFs bring with a consistent viewing experience. But nowadays i prefer web standards like html docs (or html-like docs like some markdown files, etc.) because the flexibility of the viewport is more important to me. By this i mean, if i'm viewing an html file on mobile, the mobile browser will size the text nicely for my eyes (unless the html file has been coded to be too pixel-specific, which is bad dev. practice in my opinion). I do not often have to pinch-to-resize content with html files, while PDFs mildly annoy me with the constant need to pinch to zoom, etc. Again, things are way better than they used to be, but i'm still a fan of web standards. Or, maybe if there was a single document standard that provided the benefits of both perspectives: the flexibility of html where the viewer can flex the experience; and, the choice of PDF-like "locked down"/consistent view for other audiences...Plus, is an open standard so as to avoid locking anyone out of freely using it ("free" as in both price and liberty of source and rights)...Then that would be the holy grail of document formats.
I get only a first-'graph tease of the article.
Someone care to Pastebin (or PDF) the text?
(One thing HTML has going against it is an increasing amount of paywalled / blocked content.)
The amount of free articles you have read this month on Medium is stored in a cookie. So if you clear/delete all the cookies for medium.com in your browser, that will reset the count, then you can refresh the article page to read it in full. And if you also block medium.com cookies in your browser settings then you won't have to worry about going over the free article limit again.
Or if that's too much hassle, you can always just type outline.com/ before the URL (which also works to get around a lot of other soft paywalls too): https://outline.com/marker.medium.com/the-improbable-tale-of-how-the-lowly-pdf-played-the-longest-game-in-tech-d143d2ba9abf
I browse virtually exclusively in Incognito mode.
There are no cookies.
(another common way to get around "harder" paywalls that don't offer free articles, like the New York Times or Washington Post, is to disable Javascript execution for that site.)
If your a Firefox user this addon bypasses many pay walls automatically
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/
Chrome/Android doesn't support extensions.
Though yes, that's useful for desktop users.
(Note that mobile is about 90% of present Web use.)