Solitude

This is a half-ranting, half-questioning post. Please bear with me.

What does .pdf do that isn't already done by numerous other, much more compact, file types? I really don't understand the purpose of .pdf. Can someone please tell me why this format is used at all?

It has caused me endless problems including computer lock-ups, hogs up tons of space, requires downloading a special reader, places all kinds of restrictions on viewing/editing/saving files.
What's it good for, besides causing headaches?

Here's my latest one:

I really can't stand (f'n HATE) pdf files. I refuse to download the acrobat reader on my home system.

numist_net

you use it because everyone else does because everyoen else is sheep.

Thats the joys of a monopoly, except acrobat isnt a monopoly because it doesnt have that big a share.

Youll just have to live with ranting. Sorry.

gal

What other filtypes?

Kyp

I hate .pdf's. They're way too big for something that could so easily be smaller.

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bodypainter

Okay, tell me what to use instead. Let's say I use InDesign to create brochures. I want to be able to send them to other people, none of whom have InDesign. Here are my choices.



The only one I see besides PDF that might work is HTML. But that has significant drawbacks (like not being able to embed fonts). What other format would be a good choice?

vulture

Just a few advantages of pdf:

- widely used
- not so easy to change (read: falsify) like... say a .doc

and maybe the most important point:

- it can be used under different OSs
(Which is of course due to the aformentioned fact that you have to download a reader...)

Now, I'm not saying that pdf is the best there is, just trying to answer the initial question:

Mondak

I will expand a bit on Vulture's response.

I am a huge PDF convert. I began using it about 4 years ago when somehow I got a full version of Acrobat at work.

I typically have to write and send large contracts to clients as part of my work. When you absolutely HAVE to make sure there are no changes made to it, but you still want to be able to colaborate on it and get someone's feedback on what needs to change, PDF is the only way to go. The permissions can be set in many different ways to allow just printing, no printing, changing the doc, annotating (or not) highlighting and a myriad of other things.

In addition, the presentation of the document you are working on will always stay the same. When I began my own company, I did EVERYTHING. I started off using MS Publsiher to design my brochures. When I sent the publisher file to my printer, I got it back with all the margins messed up. Why? he had a different version of publisher. I should have sent it in PDF. In PDF, it is always the same across platforms, Operating systems and versions. This is because the thing you look at on the screen is created from the Printer instructions which do not change.

When I signed contracts for my own company, I did so digitally. I never had to have a paper contract and so I did not have to wait a day for FEDEX to get there. I could conduct business transactions the same day with a digitally signed contract.

I also like the ability to take a form and fill it out on screen and print it out, rather than have to print it out and fill it out with a pen. It looks much cleaner.

There is a lot you can do with the File type, but most of it can only be done with the full version of Acrobat. It is expensive, but at least in business, it is very valuable.

BTW, I know you were complaining about the file sizes. Typically the file sizes are MUCH smaller than any Word doc of Powerpoint files. The whole thing is designed to be very compact. PDF is supposed to stand for Portable Document Format. They should not be crushing your system resources. . . or at least should be the last thing killing your comp. Is the computer otherwise crappy or is this just a PDF thing?

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Soggybagel

I think when you think of it being slow on you folks computers that is due to the fact that you are not only opening a decent size PDF file on your comptuer but the program isn't opened so you it has to launch up and then download the file. I like PDF's myself also as they look in my opinion cleaner and more professional than a standard Word DOC with pictures inserted.

phukraut

i would prefer to use .dvi or .ps, but i am sometimes forced to convert dvi2pdf not everyone has yap!

Melraidin

Just a reminder to all (from someone who has developed an independent PDF generator): if you're using PDFs for their security/permissions, realize that the master password is far from secure.

When you set permissions on a PDF, you choose a master password. This password is required to change the permissions. This password is not used to encrypt the document. This means that while you may have created a document with permissions not allowing the user to copy and paste from the document, etc., it's still not tough to do.

If you are looking to encrypt the document to achieve much better security, enable the user password as well. This encrypts everything in the document.

chavos

esp. since i use a mac, i like that it's cross platform. i don't have to worry about compatibility at all. but i do understand bitching about slow load times, et al, but really...there's something going wrong if it's crashing your system.

gal

dvi is not machine independent.. ps is the only alternative to pdf as I see it, but it's uncompressed, and lack features. For reading scientific papers online and publishing my own stuff, pdf is the only way to go.

charliex

PDF is simpler form of PS, its a doc style with lots of formatting info, since its not a language as such, (PS is), but it has some advantages over PS. you can access pages randomly, you can't in a PS, PDF is usually larger than a PS, PDF was designed for viewing on a screen thy've been adding printing to it, PS was designed for printing.

PS is much more powerful than PDF, as its its a RIP'able language.

rubicon

PDF is...

-- Cross-platform (PDF = portable document format)
-- Safe and secure (no getting a macro virus like with Word)

Acrobat Reader and Acrobat have been solid on all of my various Windows versions. Your mileage may vary.

PDFs created from applications like Word and Excel are small. If you're trying to scan text or a photo the PDF may be big - that's more the case of your scanner settings than it is the PDF.

I'm still not sure if anyone presented a "better" format that is cross-platform and widely known (aside from PostScript). Not much of a point to use something no one else uses.

Besides, I'm not sure the majority of users have a need to create PDFs. People in sales and graphics have a need.

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gal

I'm not sure what you mean by pdf being simpler, charliex.. Pdf is already rip'ed which means you get true wysiwyg. Postscript can look different depending on the rip, especially for colour prints.

I use Latex-dvips-ps2pdf or distiller a lot, and I've yet to see that a pdf becomes bigger than ps. A bitmap in ps is huge. In pdf I can easily change between print-settings or settings for online viewing, where the online setting can produce very small files with downsampled jpeg images.

For viewing and printing papers with text and equations, I haven't found a good alternative to pdf. I use gsview for viewing ps, where I get an ugly screen appearance Pdf has nice anti-aliasing for embedded fonts. And then you can get links, bookmarks of indexes, reviewing, signatures and simple editing. I've never had a problem with stability on either Windows or *nix. I'm not too happy with the latest version of Acrobat though.. as with most other software, it's becoming bigger and more memory hungry for each new release.

Ganguro

I personally love pdf's. As a student in college we were required to include documentation on all our projects and that sometimes required a dozen pages plus diagrams. With a pdf, i knew that whoever viewed my project could see the documentation no matter what OS the were running, and didnt have to worry about attaching image files, or compatability issues. With a pdf i could set my resolution and layout so the document looked pretty much the same no matter where it was viewed.

nothingx

You would prefer to use postscript????? Dude, those things are fuckin' huge compared to their pdf counterpart!

-rw-r--r-- 1 white grad 7908 Apr 16 12:03 teamformation.pdf
-rw------- 1 white grad 38368 Apr 16 13:03 teamformation.ps

PDFs rock. They're small and most importaintly compatable with everything. You see, the greatness of the PDF is that you can publish a PDF and give it to anyone anywhere and it will look exactly as you intended it to. Ever tried giving someone with M$ Works an M$ Word document? It's a text formatting nightmare. Even html cannot be 100% reproduced using different webbrowsers. Actually, the most recent version of OpenOffice supports outputting directly to PDF.

Melraidin

Oy... How could someone possibly say a PostScript file is better than a PDF? A PostScript file can be converted to a PDF with very little modifications, meaning a PDF must be at least as powerful as a PostScript file. On the other hand, a PDF may not necessarily be converted easily into a PostScript file, this time I believe this means that a PDF must indeed be more powerful than a PostScript file.

j8ear

My thoughts on .PDFs.

1. They are a format developed by the industry standard bearer for all imaging, Adobe.

2. Images created in pdf are generally not 'modifiable'. For example. A new DSL contract was emailed to me as a microsoft word document. I edited all of the provisions, to ensure that I had the upper hand in every transaction, would always be on the premium highest speed plan, would not endure any fee increases, could cancel at will and needed to approve any cancellations attempted by the provider. Then I printed it and faxed it back to them. Three weeks later I had a $39 per month t-1 class dsl over my home phone line, and no one asked me a thing about that contract. It was brilliant, until the DSL provider went belly up (verio), and then it became just an interesting story.

I learned from this one very important lesson. I will never email anyone anything other then a PDF. Unless a better standard comes along to make it very difficult or almost impossible to actually change text, grammer, or other significant provisions of a document, I will publish PDF's all day long.

-bear

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popo

The things I love about PDF's are:

1) Cross-platform
2) Formatting is not an issue, like it is in Word

When you create a pdf, you KNOW that other people viewing that file will see it exactly as you made it.

juanvaldes

charliex

Melraidin: then you dont understand what a PDF is

postscript level 1 ,2 or 3, is a RIP'able language, PDF is not, you cannot execute PDF, you can not write programs in PDF, you can't upload a PDF to a printer and have it execute code then generate output from it.

PDF is more like HTML on steriods, its is not a replacement for postscript, its a simpler form, PDF has only recently stated to add prepress features to its format, PS has had it for about 18 years, PS3 is very powerful and is the choice of most professional printers for prepress.

Though using PDF can cut down the costs at lot its considerably easier to screw it up, since its not as flexible and has many runtime options for conversion to and from it that can seriously alter the output.

I've yet to come across a PDF i can't convert to PS, if that were so how could you print a PDF on a PS only printer, (it doesn't convert it to a DDB frst)

(portable document format, postscript language)

ie ones a format, ones a language.

kel

One word:
LaTeX

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phukraut

what about it? =)

kel

http://www.latex-project.org/

It's a macro package for the tex typesetting engine. Forget about how your equations, diagrams etc. are going to be formatted and just write them... hit typeset and LaTeX makes it look beautiful... The easiest most portable way to distribute documents is through .PDF
Taken from: http://www.latex-project.org/intro.html
The fonts are lost...

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phukraut

oh i get it.. you prefer pdf. gotcha.

i never thought about the dvi not being machine indep, so i agree that's not a good way to distribute..

Dibbler

We use them at work to create forms for critical data that's shared with the client. The document can be made so it can't be changed or edited. This way, when there's a problem with a design or the data we can be sure that what they're showing us is what we did and not something they changed to switch blame.

Reese

My biggest Gripe about PDFs is that they are executed by Internet Explorer instead of downloaded. I'm glad google allows view as html

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bodypainter

Is there no way to tell IE not to open PDF's but instead to put up the open/save dialog box?

charliex

gal: sorry i missed your msg
well in two ways, first its already rip'ed so therefore its simpler, since it skips that process step, secondly theres a lot less commands in it, so its a simpler format, thirdly as i mentioned before postscript is a fully fledged language, and PDF is a format.

PDF also can look very different on colour outputs unless the whole chain is matched, same as PS, but if a device follows the PS format exactly it should have no problem rendering it as expected.

Last time i checked on PDF you coulnd't jump to half way through a document and render it, you have to download and parse the entire first half to get to that page, something i find really annoying when reading online PDFs, PS allows you to skip to wherever is logical.

As soon as i see an operating system using PDF to render its GUI and associated program graphics, i'll regress that PS is more powerful than PDF , but i don't see that happening anytime soon as that would just make PDF postscript, which adobe has no intentions of doing, they are designed for different things.