Re:PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later
by JadeNB on Friday August 14, 2020 @05:52PM
(#24163742)
> I'm not sure what you mean. I've never had an ebook or paper have any influence on how my PDF reader works or how I interact with it.
I was responding to a quote which I think, in retrospect, I misread:
> > I don't want random authors to be able to dictate how I interact with a medium
To me, random authors of PDF files do dictate how I interact with the content of the PDF file—I'm not sure whether or not to call that "the medium"—because they lay it out, and there is very little that I can do after the fact if, for example, I don't like their line breaks or their text layout, or if I want to be able to do a proper full text search, or cut and paste, etc. etc.
However, on re-reading (including your response above), it seems clear that what you meant, and what I should have understood, was not about being locked into the author's presentational choices, but about the UI of the PDF reader itself. I agree that what I said is irrelevant to this.
I was responding to a quote which I think, in retrospect, I misread:
> > I don't want random authors to be able to dictate how I interact with a medium
To me, random authors of PDF files do dictate how I interact with the content of the PDF file—I'm not sure whether or not to call that "the medium"—because they lay it out, and there is very little that I can do after the fact if, for example, I don't like their line breaks or their text layout, or if I want to be able to do a proper full text search, or cut and paste, etc. etc.
However, on re-reading (including your response above), it seems clear that what you meant, and what I should have understood, was not about being locked into the author's presentational choices, but about the UI of the PDF reader itself. I agree that what I said is irrelevant to this.