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Comment by SergeAx | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if we (like in "humanity") can live without PDF at all? The format has so many flaws and problems it is practically unusable for any task except producing a paper copy, which is progressively obsolete with all the displays and e-paper readers and mobile phones.

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PDF is quite good at producing static output that will render predictably, and there aren't really any common alternatives for this. PDF becomes very problematic when you attempt to do anything else with it though, like edit it or parse it as input.

Or like reading it on a screen size other than a printer paper.

yeah, consistency is very important in design. imagine sending your boss PSD or HTML files but their machines don't have fonts you use in your design.

Just like with PDF, you can embed fonts in HTML so everyone has the same font.

But yeah, agree with your overall point, PDF is currently the easiest, most well-supported way of sending stuff that doesn't fudge around with the design. What you send someone is almost guaranteed to be what they see, unless they use some weird PDF reader.

you can embed fonts in HTML so everyone has the same font.

How often do people embed fonts in the html via a font-face + base64 ttf or woff data-uri?

An epic thing you can do with PDF though is show an image of the font you want to show, and have a super common font like Helvetica hanging out behind it, so the end-user doesn't even need to render the font, it's just an image.

The idea of "getting away from paper" seems to be so challenging for many in its implementation that at that point they stopped thinking any further.

I work in a soewhat big corp. and PDF is viewed as the basis for the digitization of existing documents, be it for archiving or for the exchange of data with business partners. Also, we still have a fax machine in the company.

But, this is not just the opinion in my company. The public service also envisions sending and receiving digital documents using PDF as the future. E.g.: at the end of my digital tax return everything is summarized in a pdf (great), which then has to be signed and sent by post (lol).

Including security flaws, which is a big deal. I still have not figured it out how to sanitize pdfs in any reasonable way. (If someone has any suggestions here, please share.)

Not to mention need to save file in original Adobe Reader ("do you really want to overwrite this file?') every time you add a comment.

Maybe this is good enough for your use case:

https://dangerzone.rocks/

It converts documents to just images, then converts those back to PDF, all in a sandbox.

Thanks a lot! (Though it does not work for me.)

And don't even get me started on sustainability. I wonder how much trees we lose yearly because printing is the most convenient way to interact with a PDF document.

A paper copy is still one of the most fun ways to read

Not for me, since I got my first e-ink reader. Convenience and portability and access to content blows all the tactile and olfactory joys out of the water.

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