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Comment by james_morton | Hacker News Reader

PDF was made for printing, not displaying. As someone who has been in the printing business for a long time, PDF was a god send, no more worrying about missing fonts, no more page margin differences, no more driver discrepancies.

What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge.

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PDF1/A is a great standard for printable documents. Because it doesn't try to do anything else.

Regular PDF with embedded flash, quicktime, HTML/XML forms and/or javascript, is a nightmare.

A few years back, I had to borrow someone's computer to fill out the UK passport form. It was full of extensions that only worked in the latest version of Adobe Acrobat - which wasn't available on Ubuntu (at the time). I couldn't even print the form and fill it by hand.

Yeah, it’s bad when governments depend on proprietary formats like that. It would be better if they would use a simple web app for entering the data, and then generate a PDF server-side. (Or even better perhaps, just let the whole application process live online.)

Doing forms in PDF directly is not the most unreasonable idea.

The problem is it's not one, but three ridiculously overcomplex specification: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format#Inter...

It's fine if it's the easiest method available with universal support. In this case in failed on both counts.

Emphasis in "printing, not displaying".

The objection should not be "PDF must die", but "people mustn't use PDF for other purpose than printing".

> What you see is what you get, wherever you open it, wherever you print it, that is huge.

Not really, it depends on the PDF software. I have printed the same bill with SumatraPDF, Acrobat Reader X and Acrobat Reader DC: different fonts, different sizes and missing logos...

That's why when you're trying to print professionally, you're gonna use the original software and not something that try to re implement it. I know it's sad, because open source, but when a (good) standard exist that is closed source, we have to made due, till something arguably better exist.

If the underlying document doesn't embed the fonts it uses, then the reader would perform substitution. This causes different outputs on different readers.

It's more of a PDF producing application problem that fail to either embed the rather uncommon or proprietary fonts.

Usually it is the PDF that is at fault, or rather, the assumptions made by the author (or the authoring software). A PDF meant to be portable and usable for a long time should embed all fonts used. If you get different fonts and sizes in different viewers, that tends to hint at a lack of embedded fonts, leaving the PDF viewer to substitute using its fall back fonts.

Most PDFs I come across tend to come with embedded fonts and work just fine on any decent PDF-viewer.

portrait page layout on a landscape screen when what we really want is multi-column landscape layout

He didnt add these important words: "on the web"

PDF as a primary info exchange format online is stupid and needs to die

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