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unportable document format
Jun. 17th, 2004 10:25 ampdf -- how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways:
1. A downloaded pdf document with a tiny bit wrong at the end will refuse to display, even if the multimegabyte file which took ages to get on a slow dialup line has only an inconsequential bit of garbage at the end.
2. It is often extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to convert pdf to any other form of readable document and retain simple things like paragraphs.
3. pdf is a proprietary format so if the company that owns the format dies or decides to produce another "better" format then your old documents may well become unreadable in the future unless you manage to keep your current reader program and it continues to work on all future operating systems. The past is littered with orphan document formats for which there are no readers on current computers though, so I don't like your chances.
4. pdf is a format for people who never really made the move from paper to electronic texts. They don't read stuff on screens, but print everything out. They are still lost in the past of dead-tree paradise.
5. pdf, being a format for paper is almost always laid out taller than wide so that it fits a standard paper page, but is annoyingly difficult to read on a screen, requiring a combination of scroll and jump to the next page (Instead of simply scroll like in a text or html document). Reading a short document this way is not a big problem, but a large one of maybe 100 pages becomes really annoying.
6. 'Bloated' takes on a whole new meaning for pdf documents. A simple document can blow out by several times what text or html would need. Only Microsoft's Word does it worse.
7. Potential for embedded mal-ware. Some nasty individuals have worked out how to embed malicious programs inside pdf documents.
8. Adobe, who developed the pdf format have come in for criticism a number of times for nasty things they've done. Most recently is in getting Russian programmer Dimitri Skylarov arrested by the FBI when he visited USA to give a talk on encryption. He had cracked the encryption on Adobe ebooks so that they could be backed up in accordance with Russian law (interesting that Russians are better protected that USA citizens -- over there electronic documents must be able to be backed up to survive computer failures). Adobe got him arrested under the opressive DMCA law even though he wasn't subject to American law. After an uproar among the programming community at Adobe's viciousness they withdrew their initial charge, but the poor guy still had to be tried under the stupid DMCA law. The judge was angry that the idiotic case had even come up and dismissed it. Unfortunately Dimitri spent weeks in detention first. Thanks Adobe.
1. A downloaded pdf document with a tiny bit wrong at the end will refuse to display, even if the multimegabyte file which took ages to get on a slow dialup line has only an inconsequential bit of garbage at the end.
2. It is often extremely difficult, and sometimes impossible, to convert pdf to any other form of readable document and retain simple things like paragraphs.
3. pdf is a proprietary format so if the company that owns the format dies or decides to produce another "better" format then your old documents may well become unreadable in the future unless you manage to keep your current reader program and it continues to work on all future operating systems. The past is littered with orphan document formats for which there are no readers on current computers though, so I don't like your chances.
4. pdf is a format for people who never really made the move from paper to electronic texts. They don't read stuff on screens, but print everything out. They are still lost in the past of dead-tree paradise.
5. pdf, being a format for paper is almost always laid out taller than wide so that it fits a standard paper page, but is annoyingly difficult to read on a screen, requiring a combination of scroll and jump to the next page (Instead of simply scroll like in a text or html document). Reading a short document this way is not a big problem, but a large one of maybe 100 pages becomes really annoying.
6. 'Bloated' takes on a whole new meaning for pdf documents. A simple document can blow out by several times what text or html would need. Only Microsoft's Word does it worse.
7. Potential for embedded mal-ware. Some nasty individuals have worked out how to embed malicious programs inside pdf documents.
8. Adobe, who developed the pdf format have come in for criticism a number of times for nasty things they've done. Most recently is in getting Russian programmer Dimitri Skylarov arrested by the FBI when he visited USA to give a talk on encryption. He had cracked the encryption on Adobe ebooks so that they could be backed up in accordance with Russian law (interesting that Russians are better protected that USA citizens -- over there electronic documents must be able to be backed up to survive computer failures). Adobe got him arrested under the opressive DMCA law even though he wasn't subject to American law. After an uproar among the programming community at Adobe's viciousness they withdrew their initial charge, but the poor guy still had to be tried under the stupid DMCA law. The judge was angry that the idiotic case had even come up and dismissed it. Unfortunately Dimitri spent weeks in detention first. Thanks Adobe.