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Comment by hwc | Hacker News Reader

I worked on PDF generating software for years. It's a horrible format that should never have been approved as an ISO standard.

When in doubt, use plain text. It's a million times better in every way that counts.

I wish my bank statements and such could be downloaded as plain text files, instead of massive PDF files that embed another copy of a bunch of typefaces in each file.

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Ugh, this. I still fail to understand how a device from 2019, even a phone, could show any rendering delay when scrolling to page 200 of a 400 page static document. I thought PDF was less programmable than PostScript, but there's still got to be some kind of non-local semantics in there.

> I thought PDF was less programmable than PostScript

It's not.

It used to be long ago, but now it has full programmability with JavaScript.

Since gdpr, businesses are "required" to make your data available to you for transfer in a machine-readable format and you could argue that pdf is not exactly machine-readable in the sense of the law. Practically I have seen cases where you do get csv or something similar, but especially smaller firms will probably give you word documents, excel files or pdfs.

Interesting! Halifax Bank in the UK changed their generation library for PDFs the other year such that new statements rendered incorrectly on the Mac. Old statements were fine. New ones were garbage text.

Chrome displayed them fine, Preview on Mac did not.

Trying to communicate this to them was like talking to a tree, or an alien, or a room of catatonic individuals.

Thankfully I think they've fixed it now.

I think that root problem here is that most people still have trouble separating the data from the presentation. We have to understand that in the end, substance always beats form.

My bank lets me download bank statements in several formats, CSV among them - not entirely plain text, although embedded in it; seems like the best choice for the usecase.

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