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Comment by whenchamenia | Hacker News Reader

Except for many, it doesen't. Why glorify a closed format that we spent decades trying to aviod just because its common now? The inherent issues persist.

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PDF has been released as an open standard since 2008.

198 CHF to obtain ISO 32000-2:2017 from ISO, however.

That's the same price as C++ (ISO/IEC 14882:2017) and much cheaper than the entire languages codes standard (ISO 639-1:2002, ISO 639-2:1998, ISO 639-3:2007, ISO 639-4:2010 and ISO 639-5:2008).

I get your point, though.

since ISO 32000-2 there is no proprietary technology included[1]

[1] https://www.iso.org/standard/63534.html

Not all PDFs are standards compliant, plenty are filled with acrobat only JS, embedded flash and form filling crap.

As e.g. the fine men and women of Int. J. POC||GTFO have demonstrated, it's possible to embed all sorts of weird and wonderful things in a PDF. I think a format where it's possible to include as much as possible is better.

Just look at HTML. Would you rather have it be impossible to extend beyond text, images and stylesheets?

I would. The modern web is a rich-get-richer hellscape of surveillance and advertising.

html can include acrobat only JS and embedded flash and form filling crap.

Form filling is part of the standard, specifically, the process of applying an XFDF to a PDF, which even allows you to do things like present a remote web form and then inject the data into the PDF.

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