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> I'd like to see you try to have a conversation on a tech & startup news aggregator built in PDF, see how quickly your reader loads it then.

Sure. I agree we shouldn’t replace interactive web apps with PDF.

> I don't know what "multi-hundred page PDF loads in the blink of an eye" for you but even a 100 blank page PDF takes nearly a second to fully load on my beefy rig (I did the test a few months back to prove a point).

The manual for PGF/TikZ [1] is a huge PDF I frequently open. It's more than 1300 pages and has lots of graphics. It opens and navigates in the blink of an eye on my 3 year old laptop (with the Okular reader). PDFs aren't perfect, but they sure feel spiffy compared to modern webpages.

I do agree with some of the article's complaints, but not this one.

[1] http://mirrors.ctan.org/graphics/pgf/base/doc/pgfmanual.pdf

What reader do you use?

Okular [1]. It's strange; I'm a KDE user and big fan of the core DE, but I find almost all the KDE software outside of that core DE nearly unusable. Except Okular – it's by far the best PDF reader I know. I guess credit goes to Poppler for the heavy lifting [2].

[1] https://okular.kde.org/

[2] https://poppler.freedesktop.org/

Try zathura, if you haven’t. Super fast, and keyboard oriented.

thanks! really cool

I use qpdfview and it works very well.

That is created using LuaTeX and I'm sure the sources behind that PDF document are carefully crafted and LuaTeX works really well. But if you would do the same document with the same amount of images in Microsoft Word and create a PDF document is would be much much bigger and it won't load that quickly.

I will take the last part back, if someone can prove that I'm wrong about Word and PDF documents.

In that case it sounds like a problem with Word and not with PDF.

I wouldn't know – most PDFs I consume are generated by some variant of TeX. I gave a random 300-page datasheet I have lying around a go. It says it was made with Acrobat Distiller and "C2 Rendition". Feels just as spiffy as the PGF/TikZ manual.

All that I wanted to say is: not all PDF documents are created equal, some are really well and some are just awful.

The speed depends a lot on how the PDF is structured. If you export a complex CAD drawing you may have a ridiculous amount of detail that has to be fully rendered before the page can be viewed. Or you can have very simple PDFs that are just a few images.

If pretty sure he's opening it in the browser.

weird, my Alfa Romeo user manual is 270 pages filled with graphics (literally, they are jpeg scanned to a pdf) and loads instantly even on my mobile phone

The first page is rendered instantly you mean. PDF, at least when generated by a sane generator, can be parsed pagewise. HTML cannot, you always have to parse everything in a page to do layout, because later objects can change or overlay earlier ones.

This is being partly addressed in the latest draft CSS specifications...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24093273

Is PDF still unstreamable? AFAIK, the TOC (catalog?) in a PDF was located at the end of the file, meaning the whole PDF had to come down in order to parse the PDF. (With the exception of the first page, as you say — some aspect of the PDF spec allowed for a self-contained page 1.)

There are libraries to linearize PDFs but not all PDFs can be converted. Some of the more popular open source PDF libraries do not support it though.

Linearized PDF has existed as a concept since v1.2 which I think was released in 1996.

You can see it mentioned in the v1.4 spec at https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/pdf/pdfs/pd... [follow the link from the contents].

https://streamable.com/erlsy6

I rest my case

> HTML cannot, you always have to parse everything in a page to do layout, because later objects can change or overlay earlier ones.

HTML is progressively rendered by default. This has been a feature since Netscape 1.0! It is only if you use certain types of layout this is not possible. For example an adaptive table have to be fully loaded before the width of the columns can be calculated.

And it was a very important feature too, back when internet was slow.