Re:BreezyPDF Lite: HTML to PDF generation as a Service
by contravariant on Friday June 29, 2018 @02:56PM
(#17426785)
There's a pretty good reason for scientific papers to be published in PDF. First of all TeX was originally designed to work with PostScript which was intended for communication to printers, so the step to PDF was easy to make, second of all PDF has had fairly broad support and unambiguous representation for longer than HTML has (and even though HTML appearance is now somewhat standardised it's still nowhere near as stable as PDF has been).
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Re:BreezyPDF Lite: HTML to PDF generation as a Service
by jacquesm on Friday June 29, 2018 @03:22PM
(#17427012)
PDF stable? The only party that properly renders PDFs is the one that came up with the format, it's as bad as Microsoft Word in terms of interop.
That it is a supposedly open format is a joke, there is so much old cruft in there that you could implement if you had access to Adobe's source code but unfortunately nobody but Adobe does.
PostScript (which PDF is a restricted version of in many ways) is clean, but PDF is not.