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Comment by ropiwqefjnpoa | Hacker News Reader

I'm not going to say the PDF format is perfect, but I do like sending out documents knowing that in general they are going to be opened by a reader in a presentation format. I'd rather they not be opened by an editor, where my viewers are immediately invited to start making changes like a word doc. I suppose having them open initially in a non-editable mode would work, Acrobat functions that way.

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It’s phenomenal for so many use cases it’s absurd. I have a huge stash of PDF files—tons of articles that I’ve saved so I can refer to them later. Meanwhile, half the links I have to blog posts are dead, if not more. I know that I’ll be able to read these PDFs 10 years from now, or 20 years from now. Plenty of them are 10 or 20 years old.

PDF is great for:

- Archiving. It’s self-contained and will work 20 years down the line.

- Math. Anything with equations.

- Printing.

I’ve tried various techniques to archive web pages with varying degrees of success. With PDFs I don’t need to think about it.

Why not just archive.org or CTRL-S?

- archive.org - lots of stuff was never archived, or is not available due to /robots.txt

- ctrl-S - not self-contained, compatibility depends on which browser you use (Safari at least gets it right and puts it in a single file, but then other browsers can't open it. Firefox usually saves it correctly and portably, but now you have multiple files, and you can't rename them because they have references to each other, which makes it hard to organize. Then there's all the JavaScript that web pages sometimes have, which can break in the archive.)

If a PDF is available it's easily better than these alternatives. In general I save webpages I really want to refer to later by copy-pasting the text out and manually reformatting as Markdown, or sometimes with wget.

Didn’t archive.org at some point say they would ignore robots.txt? I wish they would.

CTRL-S might download 10's of files and folders just to save one webpage. And then the html page when opened, starts running scripts and calling home, it's a mess really.

Yeah, now that nearly everything prints or saves to pdf format, I have little use for a direct editor. Just make sure my PDF's always open and always look the same.

What I would like, is to make PDF's easy to markup with highlighting, circles, comments etc. Currently, even in Acrobat, it's not very intuitive.

Interesting. I recall saving as MHTML when I was young but it looks like that's not a thing now.

Internet explorer 5.5, or whatever, supported mhtml flawlessly, but then, Mozilla, or Netscape, it was called, didn't. So unless you're on ie 5.5 for life you're skits out of luck. Mhtml was flawless afaik but nothing else than ie 5.5 or whatever supported it. Mozilla which was Netscape sure did not. mhtml was the best thing. Except whenever using anything but ie 5.5 that is/was.

On the mac I found Skim to be pretty good for annotating PDFs

I find "Preview", standard PDF viewer for the Mac to be pretty good for annotations. I "think" it might be available under acrobat for windows but it's a bit more obscure.

Certainly, between me a mac user, and colleague using Linux I was able to provide feedback on their documentation in this way ...

You might want to take a look at the singleFile chrome/firefox extension. It essentially combines all images, scripts, css into one html file that can be opened offline. As a bonus you can edit the html page with the inspector to hide irrelevant parts and it will save it in that state.

How is that different than mhtml, which is already the default file type for ctrl-s on Chrome?

MHtml doesn't execute javascript, see https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=452901 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=330663

Also, presentations. It's pretty calming to know that every slide will look as intended, without anything misplaced or missing.

Unlikely to be true unless you use PDF/A.

Even with PDF/A, rendering fidelity is greatly impacted by the viewing software. Especially if that viewer is based on open source, where only a fraction of the PDF spec is implemented.

I tend to save a lot of online articles I want to read as PDFs, but found that on many "modern" sites printing as PDF only saves the first page. What's your work process? Do you run into similar problems?

Exactly. Even if it's now fairly easy to edit a PDF (although the obvious approaches like opening them in Word still often visibly mess with the formatting), sending something as a PDF is a signal to the recipient that it's not meant to be changed.

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