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Comment by ocdtrekkie | Hacker News Reader

From an additional tweet, we can see that Guido's biggest reason for disliking PDF is the text not being responsive.

This is actually my FAVORITE thing about PDFs. They're like pages. They perfectly replicate the book medium they are often taken from. If I want to make something bigger or smaller, I can do that, and it just works with zoom. It's not trying to guess what I'm trying to do and adjust things in ways I don't want.

I'm sure it's an unpopular opinion, but I love the PDF.

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I thought I hated PDFs until I got my first Macbook and discovered Preview and two-finger zoom. Turns out, I just hated Acrobat and zooming with buttons.

They're delightful to read on mobile too with a reader that maintains zoom and allows continuous scrolling. I don't mind flipping the page but it's far more friction than flipping the page of an actual book since you do it about 5 to 10 times more.

What mobile PDF readers do you recommend? I’ve been longing for zoom fixation and continuous scrolling but had no idea this existed in current apps.

Foxit PDF Reader does this beautifully. It's far better on iOS but still works better than the alternatives on Android.

Trust me, it is a DREAM to read PDFs on mobile with Foxit. I avoided PDFs for years because iBooks and Kindle suck on mobile. Acrobat failed to even render the text in a PDF I tried so that was a non starter.

Cool! Will try Foxit then.

I just wish that PDFs were more developer friendly, from what I've seen they're kind of a painful format (not that the modern web page is any easier to read the source of but still)

PDF is a lot easier to handle if you consider it binary output, just like PNG or JPEG. For a lot of developers it makes more sense to use one of the PDF emitting tool chains or libraries available instead of working with the PDF file format directly — the most well-known option being LaTeX of course.

I have no issues with generating PDFs, I think it's great for that. It's the fact that it's a format that's almost impossible, or takes an extreme amount of effort, to retrieve information from once it's been rendered that I don't like about it. It's more akin to an image format than a text format.

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