What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?
Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.
The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.
Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.
Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.
Those have different purposes. Word/Excel documents are meant to be editable so that anybody who opens the file is able to add to it, etc. A PDF is effectively the opposite. A PDF is generally meant to be an immutable document that looks the same in any program that you use to open the file.
The purpose of a PDF is not security, obfuscation, etc. If you NEED to manipulate a PDF, then sure, it is technically possible to do so. But it takes knowledge and effort to do so. As you say, it’s cumbersome, tedious, and counterintuitive. The primary purpose of a PDF is to be a read-only document that looks the same regardless of the screen resolution, the fonts that are installed, etc. On the other hand, Word/Excel documents are designed to be as simple as possible for anybody to edit as needed at any point, with the downside of being affected by things like screen size, fonts installed, etc.
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No please, microsoft already has a monopoly I’d much rather the standard be open
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That’s sort of like saying “I’m overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let’s turn on the heating and see how we feel once it’s 45ᵒC”
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What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?
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Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.
The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.
Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.
PDF is still shit, despite being open. Even a “minimal” viewer like mupdf has to carry a 100MB library with it. Interpreting them is arcane knowledge.
Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.
Meanwhile, Commonmark… whoa, still 126 pages printed as pdf, with all edge cases. Though they do want to be well-specified.
Those have different purposes. Word/Excel documents are meant to be editable so that anybody who opens the file is able to add to it, etc. A PDF is effectively the opposite. A PDF is generally meant to be an immutable document that looks the same in any program that you use to open the file.
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The purpose of a PDF is not security, obfuscation, etc. If you NEED to manipulate a PDF, then sure, it is technically possible to do so. But it takes knowledge and effort to do so. As you say, it’s cumbersome, tedious, and counterintuitive. The primary purpose of a PDF is to be a read-only document that looks the same regardless of the screen resolution, the fonts that are installed, etc. On the other hand, Word/Excel documents are designed to be as simple as possible for anybody to edit as needed at any point, with the downside of being affected by things like screen size, fonts installed, etc.
A screenshot does that. DOS had no screenshots, but now we have them.
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Can we just create a standard that is content-centric and not representation-centric?
Lighweight Markups are a good start. Pack it in a zip to carry media and good.
Yes, i hate multi-column text. It messes with my focus, makes the text harder to read. While others love them. Let me read it on my terms.