PDF Is the World's Most Important File Format

What are you using for that? In my experience annotation support is very spotty, not user-friendly and not cross-platform, so I rarely use it for collaboration. Even fill-in forms one gets for reimbursements often seem badly done with too small or too large boxes or missing boxes. Thus, pdf seems fine for read-only, but making changes afterwards is not a good experience.

For instance, check out the Canadian passport simplified renewal form [1]. The upper-right corner on the first page is "$FORM$054(06-2018)$V$1.4$CS$0$C$0" on the Apple stack and a proper QR code which changes as you fill in the application in Reader. The big blue "Read Instructions" buttons don't work on the Apple stack either.

It may be important, but it's a waking nightmare of a spec.

[0] http://mariomalwareanalysis.blogspot.com/2012/02/how-to-embe...

[1] https://www.canada.ca/content/dam/ircc/migration/ircc/englis...

PDF is not the "lowest common denominator".

That would be the format that can be most easily converted to other formats.

With text and images, I can easily create PDFs and documents in myriad other formats.

Alas, PDFs do not convert as easily to other formats. To this day, no one has a PDF-to-text converter that is 100% reliable in preserving the proper line lengths. Not even a company with Google's resources.

But we'll never have that (not in the sense we have PDF.) Either it's an image or an application, no one really understands how to handle anything in between.

That said, my personal favorite for a complete screw you to the format comes from Texas and form 2382:

https://hhs.texas.gov/laws-regulations/forms/2000-2999/form-...

If you decompress it, you'll find that they encoded an HTML webpage into the PDF and, as far as I can tell, this can only be viewed on Windows with Acrobat. It's almost like Texas doesn't want people to apply for medicaid funds.

I would rather have a plain ole html file with formatting flags than a PDF book.

Some governments, e.g. Dutch government, mandate that PDFs be tagged PDFs.

Here's computerphile video that explains it

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=48tFB_sjHgY

back then there was only 1 format in the world .doc

PDF became standard because it was a SUPERIOR solution for the use cases that most people wanted.

A better solution, perhaps, for preserving structure, would be TeX, markdown or Org files, but PDF has the advantage of not having to be compiled and being ready for presentation/consumption (possessing platform invariance).

And then they added JavaScript to it:

    http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/javascript.html

Its not like you can read text without the right program, its still binary, there just happens to be a mostly agreed upon standard and a lot of programs that can decode that standard and render to screen.

PDF viewers are built into most browsers now and allows rich page perfect print ready results.

If I had it my way we would settle on a binary data serialization format, I don't care MsgPack, Protobuf, heck maybe even sqlite and then everyone could have a viewer to snoop around in it. You would still have to understand whats being encoded but you could always "view source" so to speak.

Hmm. Maybe your charset is Windows-1253, and unassigned characters are being supplanted with the equivalent codepoints from Windows-1252?

- While it's fairly easy to read and write plain text, it's also fairly easy to inadvertently introduce unintended artifacts in the process.

- The more frequently a file gets passed around and read and written to, the more likely mojibake[1] will get introduced. This concern rises exponentially when you move to non-US audiences and introduce local-specific encodings. File storage settings, client operating system settings, server configuration settings, database settings, programming languages that touch it along the way. All of them introduce assumptions along the way of a file's encoding, and many failure cases can be subtle and easily go unnoticed at a glance while causing some irreversible damage to downstream recipients.

- Even if you solve for the encoding, you still have structural issues with tabular data. Different parsers treat escaping and quoting policies differently. This can result in data shifts as things get mis-parsed, data corruptions if literal values get interpreted as escape characters or vis versa, etc.

For preserving data, generic plain text tends to get worse and worse over time because it's such a non-opinionated format and even if you document the specifics on econdings and parsing details it's easy for those to get lost over time as things exchange hands or for intermediaries to corrupt the plaintext because they relied on defaults instead of the documented parsing details.

For better or worse, PDF tends to solve the preservation issue while introducing potential barriers on the parsing/processing side.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mojibake

You can see the text code by doing something like this:

  pdftk input.pdf output input_uncompressed.pdf uncompress

Maybe you mean ASCII, which is indeed simple and also not useful for several billion people. (I live in one of the many countries that cannot use ASCII -- the American Standard Code for Information Interchange -- because don't speak American here.)

Or maybe you mean Unicode which is an extremely long spec and absolutely cannot be handled by a first year programming student.

there is churn in all major applications these days regardless of if it is needed. Reader is just trying to regain mind-share back from people viewing pdfs in browsers.

With very narrow exceptions, that are even narrower than PDF publishers think, epub is and should be preferred even for technical or academic writings. (Kindle's kf8 format is just a repackaged variant of epub.)

There's also a lot less, as PDF is not a full programming language like PS.

It's the only way to reasonably guarantee someone will be able to open and read a resume in its intended form.

I tried to send a resume in LaTeX. They said they want a Word document..

What's hard about it? It's an open standard with libraries in every language known to man.

If you use it as a dumb wrapper for scanned images, that's going to suck. But as a way to store and faithfully reproduce nicely typeset documents with images - ie, to make an archival copy - I don't think it can possibly be beat.