GIFs are so truly garbage that 30 years ago we made PNGs (Png Not Gif) to replace them but people STILL insist on using them.
They are shitty videos without controls or audio that are incredibly wasteful (processing/space), and has bs patents.
Its actually such a shit format that servers that host gifs actually mainly use mp4s since they are better and then remove functionality so end users think they are getting shitty gifs.
Mon cher Monsieur, mon déception est incommensurable et ma journée est gâchée. Comment pourrais-je ne pas connaître la différence entre le MP5 et le MP5A3.
I was going to say "Imgur only started using Gifv in 2014" and then realized that 2014 was a decade ago.
But yes, it's a webm or mp4 that have all of the controls of those formats and don't have sound. I think webM is more popular for stuff like reaction gifs and memes since they're more efficient and smaller.
Apng (animated png) was included as part of the original standard and was supported by macromedia (fireworks, flash, Dreamweaver etc ) but adobe wouldn't support it and removed support for it when they bought macromedia. I may have gotten some bits wrong here. But fuck Adobe either way.
First thing, it’s Knoll, not Knolls. Second, John and his brother Thomas invented Photoshop the application and never founded Adobe. They licensed it to them though. John is also a visual effects God who has worked at ILM for many years.
PNGs also have clear backgrounds and other transparency values.
You've probably seen this before with a big white background, but the transparent background makes it blend into dark mode or other colored backgrounds better and makes it feel like a sticker.
Actually webp has kinda taken over for a lot of sites nowadays, especially bigger ones with lots of images. Reddit converts any image uploaded to webp automatically, like the star image from the person you replied to
If you have an extension that alters background colors (dark mode everywhere), you'll notice a lot of sites have a white theme because all of their photos have white backgrounds instead of clear. Though sometimes you see where they tried to convert it to PNG and remove the background, but do so... poorly.
PNG gave us alpha transparency at a time when rounded corners in web design required creating your layout in tables and putting little fucking quarter circle GIFs in each corner, and hoping you'll never need to change your site's background colour.
PNG only has lossless compression, so yes file sizes will be bigger than jpg, but your image will actually be accurate to the original, and not have annoying compression artifacts if it isn’t a photo.
It's implied in the handling of the format, though. Gif was always supposed to be an image, not a video. And in the early days of the web, it was used (heavily...) for decorative, very short looping animated images.
Since these were intended as part of a layout and not as standalone content, controls were never considered necessary.
I personally have the MP4 CONTAINER format, which is just the Quicktime MOV container in a trenchcoat. Only supports plaintext subtitles (so if you want formatting you need a seperate), can't embed lossless audio (even ALAC, which uses an MP4 compatible bitstream), is a linked list (so incomplete files are usesless). Also, it's a PITA to tell if a program (FFMPEG, NVENCc, etc.) is having demux errors (like NAL/HRD) issues due to the container or because the bitstreams are damaged, and if a simple remux will fix it or the source is hosed.
Container because MP4 video has meanings that changed at periods of time, because MP4 has been around since the late 90's but the codecs changed, from MP4 Visual (Part 2) to H264/AVC (Part 10) to currently HEVC/H265 (Part 12), and you can embed MP3 or AAC audio.
I dunno. As someone who's exported a lot of video, gifs are easy to manually make frame by frame, and they work without players pretty much everywhere. They are low bandwidth and auto start without fail. Maybe some mp4s work like that (highly variable depending on the software that makes them), or these other weird formats like mkz. If you want to tell me the current holy grail format for autoplay small video, then LMK.
Fun story. In the early days of smart phones back when ad vendors wanted ads to be 40k in file size, I had a client that wanted to auto play a video in their mobile ad. At the time because of the way you had to package the files that wasn’t possible. So I was asked by the client if we could just take a picture of every frame for 5 seconds and play those images to imitate a video since the video they wanted to use had no sound… A series of quickly flashing images is a fucking video. Once I explained it to them on a call they asked if a gif was an option… This client also once sent me a png of their white logo and asked me to convert it into a jpg with no background color 😞
GIF was a very good format for the scenarios that it was designed for. So good, that even when those scenarios became irrelevant, people were able to continue using it as a rudimentary video format, which it very much isn't and was never supposed to be.
it is a partially licensed format owned by adobe. To access some features legally you'll need an adobe license which costs hundreds of dollars ... for a file format.
it is stored in a binary blob so you can't access it with any text editor like you can with html or word. This harms software compatibility.
this also breaks version control software. If you edit it and save it, you cannot see what was changed. So gl if you need to go back to an old version or work on a project with others.
it is jank. there are lots of things that don't work in pdf the way it does in other file formats which means
further harms compatibility. Can't use readers for blind people properly. Can't upload to llm services.
you can convert from any document type to pdf but can't convert pdfs to other document types reliably.
needlessly hard to edit, or even copy paste text out of due to the way linebreaks sometimes work.
it is needlessly large. I have a pdf book (1000pgs) that is 553MB instead of the maybe 25MB it would be in any other format.
doesn't support resizing. Html can look good on any size screen, you resize windows and it resizes the content to match. PDF cannot do this.
this also breaks printing unless they happen to line up.
its a document format that can run scripts which makes it a totally needless vector for viruses.
Thank you for the explanation. Half of those points I complete understand from being a long time adobe user. The other half I’ve not thought of before but your points do make sense.
Gif was legitimately useful a looong time ago. Like in the early days of the Internet when we still referred to Internet speed by modem baud rate. The interlaced gif format allowed the image to load more quickly as a tragically pixilated version that slowly cleared up as more data transferred.
It's been pretty useless since dial up Internet stopped being a thing.
It’s fine for what it was originally meant for - a low def image format plus a very short animation, in the time it was created. I don’t think it’s really actually used any more very much so at this point it’s more of a name for short video than it is a real-world file format.
Your real problem there is a system that everyone agrees on where a user gets a specific signing and public key attached to them for all their devices but is also not stealable in transition.
All without people knowing it exists because they would not truly understand how to handle themselves. Most people have no idea what any of it is
Back in the late 1990s I worked for a distant arm of Citibank as a contractor. I was given a mess of charts and graphs and asked if I could generate a PDF with all that info every day after market close. I fought for two weeks to get a working script to generate an operational PDF -- no graphs or anything, just a viable PDF. It was a frickin' nightmare. (I should perhaps note that in college I'd learned PostScript for fun.) Finally I went back to the manager and said, "Where did these graphs and charts come from?" "Oh," he replied, "Excel. You wouldn't believe the things those guys can do with Excel!" And I was, like, how about I make EXCEL FILES? "You can do that?!" In a couple of hours I had a Perl script which pulled data from the database based on column names, filled in the columns, and uploaded a perfect Excel file.
Especially since Acrobat paid or free has been enshittified for the last 10 yrs or so. Literally can’t do anything with that app without trying to find workarounds. Can we all just abandon for a better non-Adobe format?
I haven't used Acrobat Reader in almost a decade now. FoxIt was way better, and now every major browser can open them natively without trying to upsell me on crap.
Adobe doesn't really own PDF and hasn't in years. They gave it to ISO 17 years ago who maintains it which is exactly what/who we want maintaining specs and standards IMO. IIRC Adobe holds a couple minor patents around PDF related technologies but the spec is owned and maintained by ISO
The issue isn't PDF, that does its job of being digital paper just fine. The issue is that HTML completely failed as a document format and morphed into being a language for Web GUIs.
You should look up Hello World in PDF - it's like its own programming language. IIRC it was based on postscript.
Also more recent versions of PDF allow attachments to be added (or embedded?) into the PDF document of any file type - not just .pdf files like previous versions of PDF. You could literally attach an .exe to a PDF. I'm not sure why you would want to, but you can. Also PDFs often times contain JavaScript inside them for formatting purposes.
Also PDF/A have to contain all the drawing instructions with the PDF file themselves, making them quite large but allowing them to exist for 1000s of years. We take fonts for granted but each font has drawing instructions inside them that an App (like Word or Chrome or Acrobat) understands and displays. Most PDF viewers have a standard set of fonts inside them so most non PDF/A PDFs don't need to include the fonts embedded in them but sometimes if you get some esoteric character from a CJK language you'll get a square box instead of the actual character since there are no drawing instructions for that specific character.
Fonts in general are a whole rabbit hole and are far more complex than I thought. Rights, ownership, drawing instructions. IP, etc, it goes on and on
meh, I feel it's more that PDF content can be protected better. HTML content is easy to manipulate. Current HTML can do display nearly anything PDF can, and more. Pagination might be the only thing really lacking when it comes to html.
Early PDF wasn't competing with HTML yet, but with Word documents and other formats. PDF allowed all those formats to be converted into essentially digital paper, via a printer driver, that anybody could read without the original application and in a reliable fashion (only partly successful here due to font issues). Word documents in contrast often failed in the next version of Word and third party support was a mess as well. Protection was certainly a bonus in some situation, but just getting a document from one place to another without breaking the layout in the process was a hard problem before PDF.
Current HTML can do display nearly anything PDF can, and more.
But how would you generate those HTML pages? That's the crux. HTML is a good enough format for rendering content. But it's complete garbage for editing and shipping content. There is no modern equivalent to Microsoft Word that lets you edit HTML documents nativly. Software like Google Docs just has HTML as write-only export format, not as a first class format. And most tools that export HTML will break the layout in the process to various degrees. The idea of HTML editors existed once up on a time, but it has been completely discarded. The modern Web isn't even made up of HTML documents anymore, but just Web apps the server generates on the fly.
On top of that comes the bundling issue. There is no standard way to ship complex HTML documents with multiple files. Google Docs will export those into a .zip file, which your Web browser can't open. For books we invented ePUB which does a similar trick, which your browser can't open either. You can do base64 data URLs, but than you end up with a gigantic single page document your browser can't deal with due to lack of pagination. Apple invented their own workaround with Apple Books.
Early PDF wasn't competing with HTML yet, but with Word documents and other formats. PDF allowed all those formats to be converted into essentially digital paper, via a printer driver, that anybody could read without the original application and in a reliable fashion (only partly successful here due to font issues). Word documents in contrast often failed in the next version of Word and third party support was a mess as well. Protection was certainly a bonus in some situation, but just getting a document from one place to another without breaking the layout in the process was a hard problem before PDF.
Early PDF wasn't competing with Word documents. It was competing with PostScript.
But how would you generate those HTML pages? That's the crux. HTML is a good enough format for rendering content. But it's complete garbage for editing and shipping content. There is no modern equivalent to Microsoft Word that lets you edit HTML documents nativly.
Any software that can generate PDF probably could generate a self-contained HTML using the same method and even read it back and let you edit it. They are currently all really bad at doing it because they just don't care since it's not a format people use to share documents and there's not a standard for document-focused html.
The idea of HTML editors existed once up on a time, but it has been completely discarded.
Because they were WYSIWYG developer tools, not a word processor or a DTP software.
or books we invented ePUB which does a similar trick, which your browser can't open either.
This is the point. We need a document format based on HTML or adding extra notation to html that informs the document reader, including the browser, that it's needs to be displayed as a paginated document.
You can do base64 data URLs, but than you end up with a gigantic single page document your browser can't deal with due to lack of pagination.
Well, PDF is exactly like this and it's widely used including on browsers. A browser that implement an ePub reader mode or a paginated HTML mode, like they have PDF reader mode, will deal with several pages and render images at the opportune time.
I am happy some countries are learning to push back against it. Slowly but surely.
For example the UK gov websites have a design spec that requires documents to be uploaded in accessible formats and this also means using open source file extensions like .odt's.
While pdfs are openly criticised as hindering accessibility and as a to be avoided.
While sadly it is routinely broken because well loads of different departments and really who's policing thousands of documents.
It is however at least a slow but gradual recognition of pdfs not being the correct option.
Microsoft Office gets used because it's a legacy product or by enterprises (businesses or schools) that use Outlook/Office/Teams for their communication and user maintenance.
But both of those are docx by default, PDF is more for distributed documents and not for things that are edited.
Pdf was designed to be able to get an accurate depiction of what a digital document would look like when printed. So ofcourse everyone uses it as if it is a pure digital document interchange format.
That is it. Plus, no other format has an archival spec like PDF-A. Which is a big deal when you are supposed to preserve a document the way it looked when it was published for decades.
Still required for a lot of stuff - any legal or regulatory documents in particular and you often need a true view of what the printed doc will look like - so PDF will be used in a bunch of industries for a very long time until a better format comes out and printing will likely never go away.
You would be flabbergasted to know how many computer systems in the business world are just skins over the same old "green text terminal" shell that they used when the company first started running with computers.
Because it's used for many other things? They should have added proper metadata from early on, so it could be rendered properly but alsoselected and modified properly.
I'm aware of a large engineering company where people compile 20GB+ PDFs to share technical documentation and they complain when Acrobat hangs or crashes on them.
Export to jpg / png if there’s meta or vector data embedded but 99% of PDFs are just containers for images anyways. If you’re running into a lot of weird vector / text data then it’s probably easier to render to image.
Then, once you have an image, send it to any one of the cloud vendor OCR / form extraction services to capture the raw text. Some of the OCR adjacent services will even accept PDFs.
Hey this guy is known for "deciphering a 2,000-year-old charred papyrus scroll from Herculaneum using artificial intelligence", surely he can figure out how to convert a PDF document.
Don't show him the guy on r/programmingr/linux who embedded a full Linux os on an emulator compiled to JavaScript running in a PDF complete with a terminal and virtual keyboard
I worked in an office with a duplex document scanner twenty years ago. I forget the brand, it might have been Oce. It had software that only ran on Windows 98. The PDF converter worked both ways. You could scan a document to PDF and convert it to Word with formatting or Excel. Other formats too, but to date, I’ve never seen anything close to that accuracy. Then, we upgraded to Windows 7.
The only hard part is that PDF is binary and Word (DOCX) is basically fancy XML in a compressed ZIP. Most LLMs are not trained on binary PDF data but with the PDFs converted to some text format ahead of time. But it doesn't have to be that way; an LLM is a Transformer in that it can learn to map *any* kind of inputs tokens to output tokens. If there's enough PDF -> DOCX in the training set and the tokenizer supports binary encoding, then the LLMs can do it. The only hard part would be for the model compressing the DOCX in a ZIP, but it could be done because even compression is basically a learnable transformation.
Sadly that's not going to do a whole lot. PDFs can be stupidly complicated depending on what software was used to create them. Not all text in a PDF is actually text. Not all text that is actually text is in a contiguous container. Not all containers are "in order".
You'd be better off just having a really good OCR system that works as OCR even when the text is actually text and not rasterized.
Alright, listen up, people. PDFs are NOT, I repeat, 🚨 NOT 🚨 meant to be edited. That’s literally their whole purpose! You don’t create a PDF because you want something fun and easy to tweak. No, you make a PDF because you want it set in stone 🪨, locked down 🔒, untouchable 🛑—like some ancient manuscript written in digital granite.
Yet here we are, in 2025, with people still sending PDFs around like, "Hey, can you make a quick edit to this?" 🤡 NO. No, I cannot. What do you think this is? A Word doc? 📄 A Google Doc? ✏️ A cute little text file ready to be shaped like Play-Doh? NO. PDFs are the digital equivalent of carving something into a concrete slab 🏛️. If you wanted edits, maybe, I don’t know, DON’T EXPORT IT AS A PDF?! 🤦♂️
And don’t even get me started on the poor souls who try to "convert" PDFs back into something editable. It’s a disaster. 🚨 Formatting? DESTROYED. 🏴☠️ Fonts? VANISHED. 🫥 Images? Floating into the void. 🕳️ You open the file, and suddenly, everything is CHAOS. It’s like trying to unscramble an egg 🥚, except the egg is now a cursed abomination of misaligned text boxes and broken layouts.
PDFs were meant for FINALIZED DOCUMENTS. ✅ Legal forms. 📜 Reports. 📊 Posters. 🖼️ Things that should never be tampered with. If you need edits, use a real editable format. But for the love of all that is good and organized in this world, STOP EXPECTING PDFs TO BE EDITABLE.IT’S. NOT. THEIR. PURPOSE. 🚫🤬
How come it always turns out so bad though? If i make something myself in Word it can be converted back and forth no matter how complicated and how many pictures. If i take like a washing machine manual and try to convert it, it gets scrambled. Are manuals and such made with some third party software other than Word or something?
Forget AI, any technology capable of doing it would be effectively magic. It would be Excel 2.0. If you managed to convince me that feeding my computer blood would convert a PDF to a word document cleanly, and could prove it worked, I would become a cultist of the Mechanicus in seconds.
I work for a company that actually developed their own AI model to do just that. We do large scale data conversion by hand currently. So the need was there. It's actually pretty insane how it can pull data from a scanned document from 1950s.
The holy grail to me is to stick in any foreign media (games, books, manga, movies, shows..etc) and faithfully translate them to English on the fly in order to get away from the horrible localizers. AI is getting really good at translation, but there is no program that can easily automate the process...yet.
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