Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by ubermonkey on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @09:22AM
(#24120004)
That's absolutely what we use it for. It's a "terminal" format for documentation we distribute to customers. We don't want to send out .docx.
Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by aj7 on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @07:14AM
(#24130781)
Exactly.
Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by DrAwdeOccarim on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @06:34AM
(#24118946)
That's why I use it at work. If I don't pay for my employees to get Acrobat Pro, or allow them to install software outside of a helpdesk tickets, then I know a PDF they generate using our lab management software is unadulterated. It's part of our data verification policy. It's not that I think my employees with change data nefariously, it's that they may want to edit the layout and accidentally change a numerical value.
Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by frandroid on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @10:51AM
(#24132575)
Don't these users have a recent version of MS Word?
Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by davidgerard on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @07:33AM
(#24119245)
LibreOffice Draw is pretty good for editing PDFs - if you have all the matching fonts. So I wouldn't go assuming people can't edit PDFs.
Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by DrAwdeOccarim on Wednesday August 12, 2020 @06:33AM
(#24130441)
They'd need to put in a ticket to get it installed, which I would need to approve. But also, this isn't to stop malice it's to stop accidental edits. I can't stop my employees from messing with things if they want to. That's where the trust part and common goals come into play.
Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by drawkbox on Tuesday August 11, 2020 @08:29AM
(#24119597)
The document can be tampersealed to help prevent or at least notify of that.
In a way a locked tampersealed document is a pretty decent template for parsing data as well. It is messy as PDFs always are but a decent lib and a consistent source with sealed docs can be used for decently verifiable scraping.
For instance some sort of license, certification or official document like tax forms, it can be generated with a common output, tampersealed and then reliably parsed after verification.
Funny enough, I think one of the reasons PDF became so popular, is because it was originally seen as a "difficult / impossible to modify file that can be downloaded as a file and read in a static way". The lack of editing tools in the most popular PDF reader for a long time (Acrobat Reader) was the reason it became such a widely used format. Especially compared to distributing a .doc or .docx where the user can easily accidentally change something.