unportable document format
Jun. 17th, 2004 10:25 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
miriam_epdf -- 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.
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I've always hated pdf
Date: 2004-06-16 09:16 pm (UTC)Adobe reader crashes both my pentium II and pentium IV computers. It is extremely cumbersome to load, ridiculous to utilize in anything other than capturing a webpage or two, and is, as you said, a monstrously bulky contraption.
I have discovered one trick with Adobe--if you go into the 'save as' feature on it, there is an option to save the document in .rtf--this only works on occasion, however. Many times I've found using the select all, copy feature then pasting it in WordPad has kept the paragraphs, but not always. My old handheld won't support .pdf files, but it does support .txt--as ALL handhelds do, thus making .pdf rather silly in the first place.
Re: I've always hated pdf
Date: 2004-06-17 05:46 pm (UTC)Yeah! What is with that? I was under quite a bit of pressure to publish SpacedOut's magazine in pdf format. Luckily I detest pdf so much that I resisted, and it remains as html so pretty-much everybody on the planet (with a computer) can read it. I think it is a case of 'follow the leader' -- people are mostly still used to paper so think if it doesn't look like paper then it is 'not as good'. They still don't get all the great advantages of html: hyperlinking to other places in the web, detailed pictures hidden behind thumbnails, animations, sounds, rollover images, all in a very efficient, standardised form.
Even for capturing webpages it is not a lot of use. I habitually save interesting webpages to my computer because I have too many times revisited a site and found the cool pages no longer there. The web is such an ephemeral thing, constantly shifting and changing. I use Mozilla for browsing the net (InternetExplorer has too many security flaws for my liking). When I find a cool page I choose Save Ass from the File menu. It saves all the associated images automatically.
I've sometimes used the Save As feature in Adobe Acrobat to save in rtf format too, but as you noted it doesn't always work very well. I mostly use this as a way to convert pdf files for use on my Palm computer. There are some pdf conversion tools on the net that sometimes work a bit better. On sourceforge there is pdftohtml at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdftohtml and one guy has made a GUI interface for it that you can get from http://guiguy.wminds.com/downloads/pdf2htmlgui
But I find pdftotext to work most reliably. You can get it from http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/download.html
One of the nice things about these replies is that this has prompted me to check the site to make sure it is still there and I've just noticed he has a more recent version there. I'm downloading it as I type. :) Maybe it has fixed some of the problems in earlier versions.
What handheld do you have? I have a PalmVx -- wonderful little machine. It carries many books, my diary, phone numbers and addresses, current writings and other jottings, a few programming languages, and much, much more.