Gov.uk content should be published in HTML and not PDF (2018)
gds.blog.gov.uk
gds.blog.gov.uk
From a machine-parsing perspective PDF files are a nightmare. Chunks of text may be broken anywhere, mid-sentence, mid-word. These chunks may appear in the document in any order.
Spaces may be encoded as spaces, or they may be created a number of other ways, like by positioning chunks, or setting character spacing per character.
The mapping from code point to glyph does not need to be pure Unicode, a PDF document may contain a custom font with additional glyphs.
This is all stuff I learned by trying to parse a limited set of PDFs found in the wild.
All of these gotchas are by the way completely PDF/A compliant.
In the end it was one of the most interesting projects I worked on in my (short) career but sometimes it sucked.
In my line of work, I must lay out information and facts as if they were on paper, in order, to create a specific narrative.
This narrative can not be lost in hyperlinks, other web specific languages. Cases must be laid out in a very specific order from beginning to end, to make my argument, as to why things were done they way they were.
No other medium fits this except paper, or PDF, in a digital sense.
Edit: On websites, content should be replicated in an appropriate format, but most certainty referenced to its original. And, the original should be readily available.
It’s such a mess.
I've seen this in academia as well. And, inspired by PoC||GTFO, I've been thinking about downloading academic PDFs, writing a web server that provides an interactive model of the topic in the paper, patching it into the PDF to turn it into a polyglot, and then re-uploading the PDFs. This way people who want their PDFs can have it, those who want something a little more modern can have that simply by interpreting the exact same file as a bash script, and I get to understand the paper by modeling it.
Can someone with experience care to explain why? Does it have to do with each letter having an absolute position on the document? I have no clue, to be honest.
It is a bit of a dogs dinner now, mostly because of backwards compatibility. XPS is better but obviously failed in the market.
Didier Stevens is the best expert of PDFs that I know of: https://blog.didierstevens.com/programs/pdf-tools/
1. When searching (Ctrl+F) a commonly used phrase that occurs multiple times in a PDF, some occurrences fail to show up because of line breaks, accidental hyphenation, etc.
2. Once in a while, I come across PDF files where searches for words containing "fi", "ff", etc. fail because of some insane ligature glyph replacements.
3. Some PDF files that have a two-column layout for text still treat lines across the two columns as one line. Search fails again.
* identifying characters that won't actually print [white text; zero-size font; beneath another layer; not in printable space]. Once this lead to every letter aappppeeaarriinngg ttwwiiccee..
* text in fonts where a != aa [leaving the text as a complicated substitution cypher; caused by font embedding for only the characters in the document]
* text in images
* no spaces: have to infer from gaps in letters
And these are generated by a whole host of different software with different assumptions, and you never know if there's something else you're missing.
Assuming you have a reasonable PDF file you have to parse the entire page content stream which includes things like colors, lines, Bezier curves, etc, extract the text showing operations and then stitch the letters back in to words and then words back into reading order, as best you can.
Many sensible PDF producers encode letters and whitespaces reasonably thereby preserving reading order, but this is far from universal.
For an idea of what content stream parsing involves, this is how I currently do it: https://github.com/UglyToad/PdfPig/blob/master/src/UglyToad....
If I am given something that I am personally expected to read thoroughly - be it a report, long-form article, slide deck, etc - then the most professional format by far is a LaTeX PDF.
I can only claim anything beyond personal experience but if I want to signal to someone that a document is important and was written with care then they are getting a PDF.
It is perfectly possible to generate a PDF file with none of the issues mentioned, the problem is that most people don't have the required control of their toolchain, and a lot of tools will create such issues by default.
But of course with the HTML+CSS+JS stack being more a programming language than a document format, there is no bounds to how awful one can make it either.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A
VeraPDF also exist for PDF/A validation https://github.com/verapdf
It's not that hard to edit a PDF file either, though.
My workflow is to use pdftohtml then edit the result as Markdown and screenshot the figures before converting to HTML with pandoc.
I have been pushing to publish in HTML from the get-go, in part by citing this blog, with some success.
For example, the Massachusetts Secretary of the Office of Environmental Affairs recently published a typed letter as a raster PDF, which I converted into https://nattaylor.com/eastboston/blog/2019/3247-2017-logan-a... from https://eeaonline.eea.state.ma.us/EEA/emepa/mepacerts/2019/s...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Francis_Maude#Return_to_Govern...
However I know some PDFs don't even let you select text, they just scan in something it seems. I noticed that even for some government sites, like some city had their ordinances in PDFs that looked like they were typed up on a computer or type writer, signed by someone, scanned in and re-uploaded. Selectable text not only useful for blind people, but searching the page or copying/pasting parts of it for research, a bit of a SEO boost too probably as not sure if robots try to parse text in images even though it's probably very possible with machine learning. I know though there's been lawsuits that government websites have to be accessible but it seems like many cities and even some higher levels sites aren't taking this seriously. Not sure if they are just unaware, under budget or maybe just older sites but if they rebuilt a more modern one it'd be better. I remember reading somewhere on HN once that some city but I forget which one but they just deleted their website and replaced it with a plain text web page since people complained, so now if you need anything you got to go city hall. So basically negates having a website in the first place.
Some of the PDFs are prepared by the government, others by vendors working for the government (probably based on specs that called for this experience). It ignores the facts that many (if not most) people read on small screen devices, don't have logon credentials handy, or even know where to find downloaded documents. It erodes civic engagement and leads to real problems when policies aren't followed or generate backlash because people didn't know about them prior to changes.
The simplest thing to do would be just to send the damn data as plaintext email. The mayor actually gets this -- her newsletters are always in the body of the email itself, never as a PDF attachment or link to download a PDF. Yet her administration is still stuck on PDFs for everything.
Funny how you phrase it. Normally dark websites lets you accept the setting and never show it to you again, so you wouldn't change your mind. If you reject it - you get a redirect or a nagging screen which lets you change your mind and accept.
I’m confused the vast majority of “mobile optimized” sites don’t even have anyone look at the site in landscape mode.
>We also intend to build functionality for users to automatically generate accessible PDFs from HTML documents.
How about the other way.. PDFs -> HTML documents.
Oh I see you've added that. The problem with PDF to HTML is thst your trying to fit something static back into something dynamic. I also don't see how pdf rendering is any less complicated. There are many browser implementations that can easily render gov.uk without issues.
You appear to be jumping to ridiculous conclusions. Decisions on how we deliver content are made on the back of a huge amount of research. It's more accessible than it's ever been, other governments and organisations are following our lead.
To suggest PDF, ODF or other crippled, inaccessible, OS-constrained formats over HTML - something everyone can read with any of their devices - shows you need to do more research before posting your ill-informed views.
[0] https://github.com/alphagov/govspeak
Edit: Also, web page have plenty of other advantages. Indexed by every search engine, bookmarkable/shareable headings. What other medium offers that?
Only superficially. .docx and .odt are single files as PDF is, but the contents of those files are very different. A PDF document is designed around the assumption of printed pages with a fixed layout. Yes, tagged PDF has been retrofitted onto the base PDF format for accessibility, but most PDFs that I've seen in the wild do not use this extra feature.
To understand why starting with a PDF and converting to HTML is a bad idea, try any PDF-to-HTML converter you can find; there's the pdftohtml utility included with Xpdf and Poppler, but any of the commercial alternatives are not a lot better. Once you learn more about how PDF works, you'll understand why PDF to HTML conversion can't be very good.
You're probably looking for the WARC [0] ISO standard. Widely supported and used. Including by the UK [1].
WARC is simple enough that tools to create or extract from it are dime a dozen.
As for the incredibly complicated rendering engines to look at the extracted HTML when you want, then even links doesn't struggle to render the content.
[0] https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0002...