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Comment by JadeNB | Hacker News Reader

> What I don't get is the suggestion that PDF should be replaced by HTML.

What I don't get is the authors' assumption that replacing with HTML means replacing with HTML that correctly uses "color, contrast, document structure, tags, and much more", leaves users in "a familiar context", is not "excruciatingly slow to load both on desktop and mobile", correctly employs "chunking, using bullets, subheadlines, anchor links, and accordions", and "show[s] a standard navigation", as opposed to … all that stuff that's actually out there. I don't know about the authors, but, if you give me a choice between a typical web site's idea about the flashy, JavaScript-heavy, animated, ad-laden way that I want to consume information on one hand, and a PDF on the other hand, then I'll take the PDF every time.

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I have to agree. People will have to pry PDF's out of my cold, dead fingers. No way in hell am I going to ever switch to a web-based format. A PDF means that I know what I'm getting. A static document that can't do any fuckery around preventing me from copying text or doing their own weird implementation of scrolling or breaking back/forwards navigation or anything else that modern websites love to do. If I get a PDF, I know what it is and the tools that I use to consume that PDF don't change just because the author of that PDF happened to find a new PDF framework and was so blinded by the shinyness that he just had to implement as much of it as he could. No, a PDF is a PDF. My PDF readers all behave in a consistent way and give me the exact same functionality and the same interface and show consistent performance behavior, whether it's a PDF from the year 2000 or a PDF from today, regardless of what eccentric tastes the author might have, and the author has zero say in how I interact with the PDF.

That's how I want it. I'm tired of new formats and new frameworks and new tools releasing every single year that pretend they're better. The best thing about PDF is that it doesn't change. Yes, whatever, Adobe adds new features, but any PDF ebook I download has nothing to do with that, nor that PDF scientific paper I downloaded this morning. I don't want random authors to be able to dictate how I interact with a medium, because the vast majority of them are, frankly, idiots when it comes to this domain and they have no sense of good user interface design.

> A static document that can't do any fuckery around preventing me from copying text or doing their own weird implementation of scrolling or breaking back/forwards navigation or anything else that modern websites love to do.

You can, and I do, hope for this, and it's often what you get, but it's not at all guaranteed by the format. For example, PDF allows JavaScript: https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/acom/en/devnet/acrobat/pdf... . I think most readers other than Acrobat probably don't support it (which, of course, Adobe spins as a feature of Acrobat!), and not too many PDFs require it—although I do find that fillable PDFs, including from hopefully capable authors like the IRS, can be very finicky in anything other than Acrobat—but I fear it's only a matter of time until it becomes as difficult to "browse the PDF without JavaScript" as it currently is to browse the web without it.

> I don't want random authors to be able to dictate how I interact with a medium

On this score you're out of luck even now—if the author, intentionally or unintentionally, did a bad job creating the PDF, you're out of luck. This is one area where I'll give HTML the win: it is, or can be, good at things like dynamic reflow, whereas PDF not only isn't but, I believe, effectively can't be.

> On this score you're out of luck even now—if the author, intentionally or unintentionally, did a bad job creating the PDF, you're out of luck. This is one area where I'll give HTML the win: it is, or can be, good at things like dynamic reflow, whereas PDF not only isn't but, I believe, effectively can't be.

I'm not sure what you mean. I've never had an ebook or paper have any influence on how my PDF reader works or how I interact with it.

> I'm not sure what you mean. I've never had an ebook or paper have any influence on how my PDF reader works or how I interact with it.

I was responding to a quote which I think, in retrospect, I misread:

> > I don't want random authors to be able to dictate how I interact with a medium

To me, random authors of PDF files do dictate how I interact with the content of the PDF file—I'm not sure whether or not to call that "the medium"—because they lay it out, and there is very little that I can do after the fact if, for example, I don't like their line breaks or their text layout, or if I want to be able to do a proper full text search, or cut and paste, etc. etc.

However, on re-reading (including your response above), it seems clear that what you meant, and what I should have understood, was not about being locked into the author's presentational choices, but about the UI of the PDF reader itself. I agree that what I said is irrelevant to this.

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