Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014)

Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by blowski on Sunday August 14, 2016 @05:07AM (#12284911)

A few years back, I had to borrow someone's computer to fill out the UK passport form. It was full of extensions that only worked in the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - which wasn't available on Ubuntu (at the time). I couldn't even print the form and fill it by hand.

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Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by cpach on Sunday August 14, 2016 @05:28AM (#12284977)

Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)

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Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by creshal on Sunday August 14, 2016 @07:38AM (#12285199)

Doing forms in PDF directly is not the most unreasonable idea.

The problem is it's not one, but three ridiculously overcomplex specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Inter...

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Re:Guido van Rossum: “PDF Must Die.” (2014) by blowski on Sunday August 14, 2016 @07:47AM (#12285228)

It's fine if it's the easiest method available with universal support. In this case in failed on both counts.

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