Hacker News Reader

Comment by x86_64Ubuntu | Hacker News Reader

If PDF had an "accident", and someone was able to do to it what Steve Jobs did to Flash, I would be very happy.

Are there any other "fixed" or "docker-like" formats for documents besides PDFs that solves a lot of problems with PDF format? From what I understand, PDF is an xml based document standard.

Nope, PDF doesn't have anything to do with XML.

Are web pages/archives really less fixed than PDFs if you don‘t want want them to be? I mean I know they are in practice, but I don‘t see why you couldn‘t use them as a fixed document format.

Some contracts may need to be upheld between creator and consumer. If the consumer doesn‘t want to, well, that‘s freedom, isn’t it?

Of course it is the most code executing document format to ever execute code, so if that was the issue...

Is postscript (that‘s what PDFs are ultimately right?) capable of thing‘s that HTML+CSS+SVG isn‘t?

Edit: Oh no I completely blanked on the fact that web pages literally don‘t have pages. Seems like a big one.

>Are web pages/archives really less fixed than PDFs if you don‘t want want them to be? I mean I know they are in practice, but I don‘t see why you couldn‘t use them as a fixed document format.

Web content is not that fixed, same code can redner different in different browsers this is why sometimes we need to use some css reset rules to attempt to make stuff render as similar as possible.

What is great with PDF it that it should look and print the same everywhere, I always have issues withfor example .doc files that don't look and print the same on my machine as the sender one and it is just a few lines of normal text, nothing fancy.

So a PDF replacer should be identical on all machines this means a extremely strict specifications with no place where implementation could deviate a pixel.

Yea, you can use `position: fixed` or `position: absolute` with CSS + HTML but as you said, it doesn't dictate pages. Although, now that I think about it, why do we need pages :) Just fixed layout is good enough.

The pdf2htmlEX program does this. It creates exact renditions of PDFs in HTML, using embedded fonts and positioning each character. Personally, although it’s an amazing demonstration, I don’t really understand the purpose, when you can just distribute the PDF.

https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX

You are thinking about XPS, Microsoft's OOXML-based page description language.

You mean setting back the Web 10 years behind, with WebAssembly still not exposing everything that Flash + CrossBridge were capable of, and all the Web tools that try to replicate Flash IDE still don't come close to it in HTML5?

Nah, better leave PDF as it is, we don't need any accident.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com