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A comment on Ask HN: PDF format sucks. Why didn't the alternatives catch on?.

Re:Ask HN: PDF format sucks. Why didn't the alternatives cat... by Finnucane on Friday August 11, 2023 @02:47PM (#37092332)
Better in what way? Sure, editing a PDF sucks, but why are you even doing that? The purpose of a pdf is to preserve formatting precisely. If you don’t need that, you could use something else. You could output everything as an epub file, using html.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: PDF format sucks. Why didn't the alternatives cat... by bediger4000 on Friday August 11, 2023 @02:53PM (#37092420)
PDFs don't do an excellent job of preserving formatting either. Over the years I've looked at lots of PDF formatted files that are quite different on screen and on paper.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: PDF format sucks. Why didn't the alternatives cat... by Finnucane on Friday August 11, 2023 @03:00PM (#37092494)
Pretty much the whole book publishing industry runs on pdfs, and if they weren’t reliable, that would change.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:Ask HN: PDF format sucks. Why didn't the alternatives cat... by bediger4000 on Friday August 11, 2023 @10:18PM (#37096327)
I'm also told that the publishing industry depends almost solely on "Word".

If this dependence on "Word" is true, then I bet that if a PDF malfunctions, they just shrug their shoulders and tell themselves "that's just the way it is" ad move on. Because that's what you have to do when "Word" does something goofy, and "Word" is the Standard Word Processor.

[ Parent | on HN ]