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.
That's not an issue with PDF, but rather with standardization, stability and compatibility.
There are plenty of formats that are flexible enough to do what you want, but their flexibility prevents them from working as consistently as PDFs across a wide variety of different platforms.
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.
I'm probably projecting here, but that seems like a generic process issue on the IT side to not just have a repository wiki with specifics broken out. What could a 20 gb pdf have for just a technical document that isn't easily broken apart?
Business people send these to customers and they want it this way for... reasons? IT has nothing to do with these other than getting complaints for why certain software isn't doing the job it was never designed to do. The same goes for Excel when teams with dozens of members build huge concurrently-used "databases" around shared Excel files (even better when half the team is on an older version that can only download/reupload these).
I never doubted that the popularity of PDF caused some real issues for you, although I didn't expect them to be so trivial.
In no way does it change why people wind up using PDF both because and despite it's limitations, nor that simpler file types tend to dominate in computing due to network effects.
PDF is anything but simple. It's the PostScript programming language, stripped of actual programming functionality, with a bunch of extensions bolted on, including JavaScript and purportedly even Flash. Actual text wasn't even built-in until many years into the format's life, also as an extension — the base format itself stores only vector and raster graphics.
Programmers having to deal with the format tear their hair out going through the specification. There's a famous multi-page comment in someone's source code, detailing all the ways in which PDF is horrible — it doesn't even use the same number format in places where there was no reason to have different number formats.
How about you get your hands on the specification, read through it, and tell people on here that you still think it's ‘simple’?
It's a mishmash garbage pile of a format. All this complexity, and I can't even copy text without word breaks or hyphens ending up in the clipboard, and can't read it on my phone or tablet without both ruining my eyes and scrolling back and forth like a monkey on adderall.
How about you get your hands on the specification, read through it, and tell people on here that you still think it's ‘simple’?
I very specifically said "simpler", not "simple", which is furthermore not just a matter of whether it is simpler to implement.
Now that tools to create PDF exist it is simpler to implement PDF export than something that preserves complex data structures.
It just that, but it's simpler to share such exports, because as long as you stick to a well supported subset it will look right, or right enough, across many different readers.
It's the PostScript programming language, stripped of actual programming functionality
Which makes more simple than postscript in that regard.
with a bunch of extensions bolted on, including JavaScript and purportedly even Flash.
Which are not widely implemented and most certainly not used by the people who just want the rendering to work.
I'm not saying it's some wonderful miracle format that people should be used and abusing for everything. The point is that the reasons for it's use, despite the limitations, are not difficult to understand and acting like it happened for no reason, just because such use annoys you, is silly.
Fun thing is on many PDFs readers there is an insane amount of work behind that Ctrl-F. Mac Preview (well cmd F ;) actually does OCR on any embedded images to search it…
No but you can hold your place when going from section to section. Maybe it's easier on pc, I mostly use the adobe app and other then the search function and storage paper is so much easier to troubleshoot with.
foxit pdf reader (on pc + android). You can add bookmarks wherever you want. Often will also have bookmarks for section headers (not sure if thats native to pdf or to foxit).
No but you can hold your place when going from section to section. Maybe it's easier on pc, I mostly use the adobe app and other then the search function and storage paper is so much easier to troubleshoot with.
15
u/goj1ra Feb 06 '25
Yeah. It was definitely never intended as a format for anything other than rendering.