I can think of several ways I can print a word file to pdf. In the rare occasions I might need a pdf to share. But what I mean is pdf sucks and shouldn’t be allowed on the internet
It’s a fine format for what it’s intended for, exact preservation of content, format, and layout. Once you start looking at a the immutable archivist/distribution format and start thinking to yourself “I’d rather like to edit that” then you’ve messed up.
What a great shitpost. Fueled a strong comment section. Well done!
Laughing in LaTeX
Laughing harder in Typst
Typst is great stuff
Really want to migrate, but LyX is too good to give up…
I see you too are a person of culture.
Dude, LaTeX one of the worst piece of software that is still prevalent today, perhaps the only thing worst is Microsoft Word (and similar WYSIWYG thingy).
This video gave me a background on LaTeX I didn’t know about before (didn’t know Knuth was behind it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc
I thought Knuth is the developer of TeX, not LaTeX… That being said, I am not overly fond of the things coming out of Stanford in that generation, like lisp, TeX, and LaTeX.
Because of anonymity, I am gonna voice some strong opinions ;) These tools feels very much like the typical products of “west-coast PL”: they feel hacky, way too flexible and end up doing nothing well, and definitely born out of the whole “hacker culture” and “engineering culture”.
Maybe Scheme and Racket is better, but I never spend the time to look into them.
I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.
Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.
“Print to file” to create a PDF, but it’s Microsoft’s stupid alternative format. Can’t even remember its name, nobody used it.
Fucking xps format. Like almost everything Microslop had touched, it can burn in software hell
The best part is Word for example now by default just outputs a PDF file if you tell it to export an XPS file, which gets extra funny if you have a licensed version of Acrobat installed because Acrobat installs an extension to also export as a PDF except it works worse!
Agreed! I remember back in the day when they first created the docx format. Such bloated garbage. I think an empty file was like 100-200 KB. And PowerPoint files are unreasonably huge too
Docx is bloated XML, but much better than the binary formats before.
Depends on what you mean by “better”. I have looked at the xml content before and never got the sense I could edit it anyhow, so any perceived benefit to it for me is far outweighed by the ginormous file sizes.
Better for LibreOffice and other software to read and write.
XML isn’t meant to be written by hand.
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I remember seeing an article about how the xlsx format description was several hundred pages in length.
OOXML is over 600 pages, yes. With lots of contradictions and filler words btw. And a “standard” (with scandals abound) that has most of the format as proprietary extensions. And MS Office/365 doesn’t even keep to it, so other office suites never have as good support of the format as MS itself.
Use ODF to save your documents. MS started their “standard” because of it anyway, fearing losses in their customer base (that bound them to Windows).
That’s doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
It’s a hugely important format used by countless archived documents.
We can’t just find out one day that nothing can read xlsx.https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000398.shtml
Actually, nothing can really read xlsx expect from Microsoft themselves. They wanted to get an “open” standard so they could be used in European public administration. But they also did it in a way so that nobody else can really implement their whole standard.
ODT format is way better than DOCX.
That’s not true, although nothing can read it with the accuracy of Excel due to the complexity and lack of documentation on certain features.
Lol …accurate
Boomers made me hate PDF files
Adobe made me hate pdf files.
the world is run by PDF files
Having worked at a bank, everything is PDF files. All the billions of dollars in loans, assets, and accounts etc. it’s all PDF files of agreements and terms. The entire finance industry would be heavily destabilized if the industry somehow rug pulled them on PDFs
And the people who can’t open them
people will call you dumbass because you don’t use AI but they can’t open a pdf file
From my time in tech support I know there are two kinds of cases where people can’t open a PDF. In one group, the PDF is broken, usually an interrupted download or otherwise corrupted file. The other group, well, one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time.
one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time
They can’t. These are the people who have a family reunion in the middle of aisle 6 in the grocery store because the haven’t seen little Breighlynne since she was this big! We need to get together sometime so all the–
You need to get the hell away from the tortilla chips before I justifiably crash out!
Preach
Did you used to love pdf files?
Is that a JE reference?
Back when they were cool
How much more do we need to pick your brain in order to determine whether or not you understand the double entendre?
I enjoy single entendres, I’m not greedy
Tech muggle here.
Could we just get rid of PDFs and switch to word docs and spread sheets instead? I know this will likely cause a slurry of consequences, especially in professional circles, but have you considered: fuck it.?
K thx bye.
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.
A screenshot does that. DOS had no screenshots, but now we have them.
I mean, fucking with a PDF isn’t exactly arcane knowledge, even after it’s been signed. It’s just cumbersome and tedious and requires counterintuitive actions like pressing Ctrl+P instead of Ctrl+S.
If their purpose is to be secure, they’re shit at their job.
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.
Excel sheets are rarely accessible to screen readers. Word documents are pretty good, but tedious if you’re just trying to like read something. PDF has the best accessibility support around (except HTML, but thats a whole other can of worms).
Sounds like screen readers need some improvement.
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”
Critical temperature = user friendly. TIL.
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?
Open Office? Libre Office?
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.
No please, microsoft already has a monopoly I’d much rather the standard be open
Open Office? Libre Office?
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.
I think it’s worse that it’s quicker to take a screenshot of an image online than going through the trouble of saving it.
Writing that PDF into an USB device or into a new file are basically the same thing…
Or alternatively, why don’t we run with that approach? So many things would benefit from “save to text”. A bit farther afield but why not save to image, save to html, etc.
We should. It’s a good abstractions for document conversion.
Who remembers printing to a Postscript file and then running that through Acrobat to get a PDF? Back in the 90s when PDFs had to be explained.
exports are subject to tariffs, only religious people can be saved. So printing is the secular, free trade choice.
Printing, for the rest of us!
I mean, it’s just common sense.
I discovered on Macs, you can unlock a “protected” PDF this way. Just open the PDF in Safari, File > Print > Save as PDF. It outputs a PDF that’s identical, except it’s unlocked (it doesn’t get converted to a bunch of raster images).
Pretty sure that works on all OSes.
Pdf24 let’s you just mass import pdfs and unlock them without destroying things like bookmarks and the text. I’m sure there’s other similar options.
One time nothing really worked I used a pikepdf python lib. Open file -> Guess pass -> Resave. I was surprised it’s that simple.
What? I just click export.
Sometimes people have things saved to Google drive with the setting to save disabled but allow printing. Which means you can just print to pdf. Only case where I can think of where printing to PDF is the easiest option.
Until you realize that a PDF is literally just a format based around a standard set of instructions used to print documents.
To be fair, they added stuff to it, like selectable text on a scanned page.
Right, as another user said, it’s similar to postscript but with bells and whistles.
It stands for Print Da File.
Reminds me of Arnold’s guide to tar:
Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them
(I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.
Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”
I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)
Print Deeznuts Fuckyou
Potable Document Format. Retains formatting and safe to consume.
“safe”
Why is my PDF file booting the Linux kernel?
What? You didn’t want your portable document format to be Turing complete?
For those not in the know… PDF is a particular set of conventions for delivering peograms written in a programming language called “Postscript”, and like all programs they can be hijacked to trigger unexpected results, including the delivery of software viruses. And yes, while those programs run in “sandboxes” that are supposed to prevent propagation of harm, such environments can fall in that purpose due to creative triggering of imperfections in the sandbox code by the “contained” Postscript code.
Hence, quotes are used to convey lack of trust in the claim of safety.
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance…
Yeah, if you print to a printer what you’re most often doing is saving it as an Adobe PostScript file and sending that to the printer. PDF is similar, just with extra bells and whistles.
Apple‘s AirPrint standard for wireless printing is pretty much sending a PDF over IPP.
It was like that back in the eighties, until the manufacturers decided to save on the chips by moving functionality into the drivers. Which was basically the start of everyone’s problems with printers.
Im not so sure. I bet more than half of the drivers out there produce PCL output, and there are a lot of printers that use other languages too like ZPL and a myriad of others.
