Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

Re:Making a PDF that's larger than Germany by JKCalhoun on Thursday February 01, 2024 @08:31AM (#39215709)

PDF is supposed to a be a printer format, not a word processing document format. While I too would love to nail down a PDF subset to be a standard (for example requiring the accessibility tags that make text extraction easy) perhaps trying to create a hybrid format, one that satisfies both printers and resizable windows, is already an impossible goal.

(I've always had to keep my love of PDF a secret from fellow nerds. But here's another secret, I like printing documents out from time to time.)

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Re:Making a PDF that's larger than Germany by da_chicken on Thursday February 01, 2024 @08:51AM (#39215873)

I really appreciate what PDF can accomplish, but I also really dislike that it turns into a black box. There really ought to be something that can describe a document structure and also describe document layout in a durable and portable manner. In the range of XML/JSON <-> HTML+CSS <-> PDF <-> PS <-> RAW, it really does feel like there's something missing between HTML and PDF.

And it can't be LaTeX, because the document shouldn't be a programming language at all. "The document is a program" has proven itself to be a terrible scheme overall.

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Re:Making a PDF that's larger than Germany by JKCalhoun on Thursday February 01, 2024 @11:24AM (#39217650)

ePub is kind of trying to be that? Or maybe that hews too close to HTML.

It can reflow but tries to paginate HTML ... the way printing a web page tries to paginate HTML, ha ha.

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Re:Making a PDF that's larger than Germany by layer8 on Thursday February 01, 2024 @01:22PM (#39219304)

PDF includes optional document structure information. Most PDF creation software chooses to not generate it, though.

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Re:Making a PDF that's larger than Germany by grotorea on Thursday February 01, 2024 @09:16AM (#39216146)

I wonder a bit if we wouldn't have a easier time extracting data, resizing pages etc if we sent HTML files instead of PDF. Are even half of PDFs printed at all?

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