For those interested in converting PDF tables into CSV, there's also Tabula ( http://tabula.technology/ )
(Used by many journalists to analyze the data in PDFs)
(Used by many journalists to analyze the data in PDFs)
We have digital formats, and we decided to standardize document distribution on the one that makes it as hard to extract data as if it were on physical paper.
PDF is the successor of PostScript. PostScript is a stack-based programming language where anything can happen, while PDF enforces some document structure and metadata structure on top of it, so you can e.g. at least determine where pagebreaks are, without having to interpret ("run the code of") the whole document.
Still, PDF is simpler than PostScript in the same sense that XML is a simplification of SGML. Jumping from PDF to a well-designed format would be like jumping from XML to JSON or S-Expr.
Sure, PDF is a light on context clues for automation and is targeted purely at humans. But formats targeted at both computers and humans consistently fail (XML with accompanying XSLT comes to mind), and/or only have terrible tools for creating files (easily parsable, pretty HTML).
Either there is very little real demand or we consistently fail at making alternatives viable.
Technically it does that, yes. Rarely do I see people taking advantage of it, though; most of the times I tried to copy some text out of PDF, the result had to undergo a significant cleanup before becoming usable.
It really is a problem with PDF that it's too easy to get a file where copy and paste yields a different result than what's displayed. But this varies widely with the software used for creating the file (e.g. latex ligatures never work in copy-paste)
When people write text and data and tables on the computer then put it on a paper-like format to share that's when the problem happens.
This should output a single file and ideally it should have some way of ensuring the author it won't be modified unnoticed (that's one of the features common people use PDF for, today, they think it is something no one can modify) -- perhaps signing it with a key from Keybase would work in the mid term.
https://github.com/iffy/lhtml has something going in this direction.
If you designed a real bad format on purpose, it would be hard to top PDF. Maybe Photoshop files are worse.
That's most likely why copying and pasting sucks too.
How do you imagine a better format PDF alternative? On the one hand, we have text-based formats. They are not serialization of the exact rendering. On the other hand, we have ps, which is, probably, too complex to be manipulated as text when rendered. PDF and dejavu do kinda both, even if quite imperfectly.
So how do we construct a file format, which can render a symbol (not necessarily a unicode one) anywhere, pixel-perfect, but still has concept of words, paragraphs, preferably tables and such?
I also think that, with more love, epub could get there too. It's not an easy problem, but if we can crack SHA-1 I'm sure we can crack this one too :)