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Comment by Thorentis | Hacker News Reader

> PDF's main downside is the remarkable unevenness of the quality of the creation and reading tools

Funny enough, I think one of the reasons PDF became so popular, is because it was originally seen as a "difficult / impossible to modify file that can be downloaded as a file and read in a static way". The lack of editing tools in the most popular PDF reader for a long time (Acrobat Reader) was the reason it became such a widely used format. Especially compared to distributing a .doc or .docx where the user can easily accidentally change something.

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That's absolutely what we use it for. It's a "terminal" format for documentation we distribute to customers. We don't want to send out .docx.

Exactly.

That's why I use it at work. If I don't pay for my employees to get Acrobat Pro, or allow them to install software outside of a helpdesk tickets, then I know a PDF they generate using our lab management software is unadulterated. It's part of our data verification policy. It's not that I think my employees with change data nefariously, it's that they may want to edit the layout and accidentally change a numerical value.

Don't these users have a recent version of MS Word?

LibreOffice Draw is pretty good for editing PDFs - if you have all the matching fonts. So I wouldn't go assuming people can't edit PDFs.

They'd need to put in a ticket to get it installed, which I would need to approve. But also, this isn't to stop malice it's to stop accidental edits. I can't stop my employees from messing with things if they want to. That's where the trust part and common goals come into play.

The document can be tampersealed to help prevent or at least notify of that.

In a way a locked tampersealed document is a pretty decent template for parsing data as well. It is messy as PDFs always are but a decent lib and a consistent source with sealed docs can be used for decently verifiable scraping.

For instance some sort of license, certification or official document like tax forms, it can be generated with a common output, tampersealed and then reliably parsed after verification.

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