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Comment by Alex3917 | Hacker News Reader

> we are talking about freeing up tons of knowledge from a "good for consumption/bad for distribution" format.

FWIW PDF is actually great for distribution. It allows you to invisibly embed all the raw data used to generate the document that the end user is seeing, in whatever format you want. So if you are generating your PDFs by using PrinceXML to render HTML, you can embed the raw JSON used to generate all of the text, graphs, charts, etc. Now most people don't actually do this of course, but that isn't the fault of the spec.

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The problem of PDF is not distribution, it's consumption. It has a fixed layout that's so 1990 that makes me itch.

pdfs don't play well with ereaders.

Are the standards for building accessible PDFs worse than the standards for building accessible websites, or are they just not as commonly implemented?

I don't know anything about websites. I had ebooks in mind.

(anecdotally) PDFs usually come from many people, departments, companies, and apps. It's hard to shoehorn in accessibility if someone didn't add it in at the origin (like in indesign or whatever app they used). Or if they printed to PDF, whatever accessibility they had would probably be lost. Much of the time it's like working with a raster image with some embedded text. Not really the same as being able to edit a proper semantic document.

With a website and available source code, any dev working on it later on can still add accessibility, tweak contrasts and fonts and add screen reader hints, etc.

It's much harder to do so for PDFs after the fact. And PDF viewer apps may or may not even support the accessibility annotations. By contrast all the major browsers and operating systems have OK support for web accessibility.

Yeah, totally. PDFs are wonderful for archiving.*

They can hold so many different types of data so that they're extremely difficult to parse.

Because of this, you can put several malicious programs into them for RCE.

That way, if someone archives many PDFs, there can be a plethora of different RCE vulnerabilities just waiting for the user to discover.

It's a wonderful dream for any malicious actor.

* /s

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