Hacker News Reader

> PDF is one of the best things IMO - it's like a docker container for documents. The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document.

Sounds like you want the PDF/A standard for archiving: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

It forbids embedding audio and video and JavaScript, requires embedding all the fonts, forbids encryption and patent-encumbered compression. It's basically the PDF format with the most regrettable features stripped out.

That PDF/A URL surprised me.

Curiously, Wikipedia doesn't think it's a page or a subpage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/Wikipedia:...

I think the reason it's not appearing there is because you're looking in the "Wikipedia:" namespace, which is actually used for meta pages, not articles (e.g: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:FAQ).

Searching under the Article namespace (which contains the actual contents of the encyclopedia), it is included: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:PrefixIndex/PDF

Wikipedia has subpages disabled in the main article namespace, which makes slashes in article names possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:TITLESLASH

We now have JavaScript in PDFs?..

We have for a long time, except it was called "ActionScript", and was used for another Adobe product: Flash animations.

Of course. Postscript was turing complete, which makes it problematic for document interchange and printing, so they restricted it and called the result “pdf”.

At some point people realized they couldn’t embed arbitrary scripts in pdf files, so they added JavaScript.

Now we have the best of both worlds. It makes perfect sense if you think about it(?)

Oh how I envy your ignorance... :)

Jokes aside, yes, we certainly do, and it is every bit is horrible as you might imagine and then some. I've seen people basically re-create spreadsheets in it, with the not entirely unexpected effect of updating the values taking up to 20 seconds.

> I want to rely on professional typesetting from the publishers, not some front-end engineer's vision of what the ebook should look like and how it should be presented to the user.

I, on the other hand, do not whatsoever trust publishers. PDF runs software and that means that everything under the sun including malware and DRM can run on PDF -- and indeed that has occurred many times. It should be a non-starter for anyone who actually values the ability to read their content on any device they want.

There are many other formats, a myriad of text formats from asciidocs to markdown. For embedded devices and such, they work great I presume.

Please don't mess with PDFs. 20+ year old technology that is shitty but works, I prefer keeping the status-quo.

If PDF had an "accident", and someone was able to do to it what Steve Jobs did to Flash, I would be very happy.

Are there any other "fixed" or "docker-like" formats for documents besides PDFs that solves a lot of problems with PDF format? From what I understand, PDF is an xml based document standard.

Nope, PDF doesn't have anything to do with XML.

You are thinking about XPS, Microsoft's OOXML-based page description language.

Are web pages/archives really less fixed than PDFs if you don‘t want want them to be? I mean I know they are in practice, but I don‘t see why you couldn‘t use them as a fixed document format.

Some contracts may need to be upheld between creator and consumer. If the consumer doesn‘t want to, well, that‘s freedom, isn’t it?

Of course it is the most code executing document format to ever execute code, so if that was the issue...

Is postscript (that‘s what PDFs are ultimately right?) capable of thing‘s that HTML+CSS+SVG isn‘t?

Edit: Oh no I completely blanked on the fact that web pages literally don‘t have pages. Seems like a big one.

>Are web pages/archives really less fixed than PDFs if you don‘t want want them to be? I mean I know they are in practice, but I don‘t see why you couldn‘t use them as a fixed document format.

Web content is not that fixed, same code can redner different in different browsers this is why sometimes we need to use some css reset rules to attempt to make stuff render as similar as possible.

What is great with PDF it that it should look and print the same everywhere, I always have issues withfor example .doc files that don't look and print the same on my machine as the sender one and it is just a few lines of normal text, nothing fancy.

So a PDF replacer should be identical on all machines this means a extremely strict specifications with no place where implementation could deviate a pixel.

Yea, you can use `position: fixed` or `position: absolute` with CSS + HTML but as you said, it doesn't dictate pages. Although, now that I think about it, why do we need pages :) Just fixed layout is good enough.

The pdf2htmlEX program does this. It creates exact renditions of PDFs in HTML, using embedded fonts and positioning each character. Personally, although it’s an amazing demonstration, I don’t really understand the purpose, when you can just distribute the PDF.

https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX

You mean setting back the Web 10 years behind, with WebAssembly still not exposing everything that Flash + CrossBridge were capable of, and all the Web tools that try to replicate Flash IDE still don't come close to it in HTML5?

Nah, better leave PDF as it is, we don't need any accident.

> PDF runs software and that means that everything under the sun including malware and DRM can run on PDF -- and indeed that has occurred many times.

You can basically avoid this problem by only opening PDFs in programs like Preview and Evince, and never Acrobat.

Not really:

https://www.cvedetails.com/product/23592/Gnome-Evince.html

Having vulnerabilities is never great. However, this is a separate issue from whether the PDF reader explicitly allows code execution or supports some of the more obscure PDF extensions, which is what the parent was talking about.

isnt including fonts basically code execution in and of itself?

Aside from potential vulnerabilities (bugs), no. Font formats are declarative. The various tables that define conditionals et al have no ability to run arbitrary code, and certainly do not have any concept of scripting and the like.

Ttf has bytecode for a stack interpreter with conditionals and loops (jump instructions and loop all). That’s declarative in the sense that all code is data, but i would say it is imperative.

Yes but it is a strict set of very limited codes, nothing which gains access to the machine a la syscalls.

Well... https://www.extremetech.com/internet/308167-windows-zero-day...

First line says "except vulnerabilities".

> You can basically avoid this problem by only opening PDFs in programs like Preview and Evince, and never Acrobat.

Except some bank forms won't work [1], because someone, at some point in history, thought it was a great idea to embed phone-home DRM and "security" into PDFs.

[1] e.g. this form from Standard Chartered https://av.sc.com/sg/content/docs/BusinessBankingSmartAccoun...

Generally the PDF copy of a book is designed to fit the format of the final printed book. The PDF is even often the deliverable sent to press.

If you are using something like an e-reader, or a smartphone, the PDF layout often doesn't translate well. Typesetting is also normally also done for ePub/Mobi, but the layout is tailored to the format of the device that the document will be read on. Although there are times when publishers just take the PDF and click 'convert to ePub', which isn't ideal.

There are also other advantages to different formats, when talking about things like programming books. As an example, working code snippets for web formats. I am thinking of things like Jupyter notebook when I say this.

As others have mentioned there are also a number of security risks associated with PDF.

I can't deny there are several books I have read in PDF format however.

I do believe this happens, but I have yet to read a book that looks even reasonably typeset on Apple Books on a phone with anything larger than default.

I know a PDF can‘t do that either, but that‘s the promise of these formats right? Between the most typography focused tech company and whatever the publisher puts into the file, they don‘t deliver.

There are two issues here:

1. PDFs are fully baked/static and made for one page format (the one original book was printed on). These will never work.

2. Ebook formats are basically webpages and they have CSS. There are defaults from the ebook reader app and but often there are css settings from the publisher of the book. Their css styles mash together leading quite often to bad results. They could be very responsive but i suspect publishers test only on Kindle/ebook readers.

I am not sure why they just don't make one "master" style thats tested everywhere. But it's probably because they are not software companies. For them epub/mobi just might mean "black and white ebook release".

Also mobi is probably most of the sales and it is pretty restricted design wise compared to epub.

So basically blame the publishers.

What do you mean “PDF can‘t do that either”?

> Generally the PDF copy of a book is designed to fit the format of the final printed book. The PDF is even often the deliverable sent to press.

I believe this is precisely what the GP finds appealing about PDFs. A PDF (usually) constitutes the original copy, reproduced faithfully.

It's like the difference between buying a widescreen VHS versus one that uses pan-and-scan to fit the movie to your TV's aspect ratio. Sure, the widescreen copy may not be ideal for your viewing environment, but it's the version the director intended for you to see.

And for both eBooks and movies, you can work around the problem by using more appropriate hardware.

Knuth as a book author has written about this on his website.

“Warning: Unfortunately, however, non-PDF versions have also appeared, against my recommendations, and those versions are frankly quite awful. A great deal of expertise and care is necessary to do the job right. If you have been misled into purchasing one of these inferior versions (for example, a Kindle edition), the publishers have told me that they will replace your copy with the PDF edition that I have personally approved. Do not purchase eTAOCP in Kindle format if you expect the mathematics to make sense. (The ePUB format may be just as bad; I really don't want to know, and I am really sorry that it was released.) Please do not tell me about errors that you find in a non-PDF eBook; such mistakes should be reported directly to the publisher.”

https://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/taocp.html

But thats such a specific example. Math books have so much complex notation and wierd inline elements... he had to invent TeX for that. HTML/CSS wouldn't handle it.

Basically for all normal texbooks you will want epub as digital format. And if you have lot of ilustrations or wierd format book then just get the printed version.

I like PDFs for digital cookbooks as well.

> I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi

PDF is abysmal for books though. 1) You can't scale fonts to fit various screen sizes. 2) It's waaay more expensive to interpret and render, so it affects battery life.

And yet, I prefer it. Textbooks in any other format are miserable to read.

Textbooks are different from other kinds of books in that you have formulae and figures that can't easily be reflowed.

1) That's a feature, not a bug :)

2) Agreed, but that's a challenge for the engineers, not something we should blame the user for. Users have unequivocally spoken (Look up reviews for epub programming books on Amazon, usually they just want a PDF).

Not being able to scale the fonts for different resolutions is something only a young person with 20/20 vision would thinks is a feature.

You can zoom the whole thing.

Scaling fonts while keeping the width of the line the same causes other problems.

> It's waaay more expensive to interpret and render, so it affects battery life.

Interesting – I never noticed a difference in battery life when I was reading MOBIs and PDFs on my Kindle, but the slow refresh rate made scrolling through PDFs a nightmare. I do notice that reading PDFs on my iPad is very light on battery compared to reading web pages, but that’s because those web pages are running a bunch of JavaScript and using my internet connection, whereas with a PDF I download it once and then read it for hours.

> The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document.

cries in random PDFs that end up being printed with letters spaced by 1 cm

What size and resolution is your eReader? I can read PDFs on my computers fine, the screen is large enough. On my eReader I can't both see a whole page and have the text large enough to read, even with my reading glasses. I end up zooming in to bring the text up to readable size and then I'm only seeing part of the page and have to scroll left/right/up/down to read a page.

Scrolling left/right zoomed text can be prevented with Goodreader and these 2 simple steps

- with the crop function in Goodreader remove as much as possible margin left & right. This might cut text in the header/footer eg the page number. Optionally crop odd & even pages differently.

- turn the iPad landscape and with 2 fingers pinch to zoom the text until the margins snap to the sides of the screen. Now with a single finger scroll down to read the text from top to bottom. Flip to the next page by swiping with a single finger to the left and Goodreader will conveiniently start at the top of the next page.

In my experience for most portrait pages this enlarges the text big enough. As a bonus you can use the iPad Smart Cover as a stand in either position. I use this trick since the original iPad1 as Goodreader has been there since day 1.

> absolutely DO NOT WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text

I would love it, though, if PDF included this as something that's always entirely optional.

Sometimes I want to read something just as formatted. If my display is big enough, and the formatting has any importance, I probably want that.

Other times, my screen is smaller (phone) or the wrong shape (small laptop), and I'd rather the text confirm to the device rather than vice versa.

Also, sometimes I use my arrow keys to scroll as I read to keep my place (like a line-oriented instead of page-oriented bookmark). So just because the device is capable of it, I don't necessarily always want page-oriented original formatting because it might have two-column text to deal with or top/bottom margins that serve no purpose for me.

> I would love it, though, if PDF included this as something that's always entirely optional.

To be fair that’s what they are working on, with Liquid Mode for PDFs in Adobe Reader. The plan is that it will automatically work for all PDFs using some sort of AI magic.

Yes but as I understand, that will be a feature of that reader application alone. And it does not exist on Linux

> The way the original authors intended it to be, including fonts and all the things that go into making a document.

So that it's very very hard to read on mobile, or in a small width window.

> For example, I personally like to purchase books that are in PDF format, not epub/mobi

exactly the opposite. I want to be able to properly reflow it in a narrow window side by side with another tab on laptop, often for technological books.

What device do you use to read PDF's?

I personally use an iPad. It's amazing for it. Especially when you use the Apple Pencil to highlight text, make annotations like circles or question marks, etc.

I struggled to find good software for this. Is there a specific app you recommend?

On the iPad, I use goodnotes for that. You can import PDFs and then mark them up.

I've gone back and forth between Apple Books and Acrobat Reader a lot.

Ultimately I currently use Books because I do a lot of multicolored highlighting which is far more consistent in Books, and because Books lets you set bookmarks (to go back and forth between main text and endnotes) which Acrobat inexplicably still does not support.

Ultimately every PDF app is good at some things and terrible at others, and you're just going to have to find the app that has the best set of features for you. It is pretty sad that all the apps have significant drawbacks for certain common workflows.

PDF Viewer has worked well for me, personally.

I use notability on the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. You can import the pdf, then annotate

I like GoodReader for this. It’s the only app I’ve found that stores my annotations in the PDF files themselves, and allows me to keep my PDF library in sync over SFTP, Dropbox, etc. so that I can read and annotate documents on non-Apple devices as well.

I’ve been a very happy user of LiquidText [1]. You can load multiple PDFs/images/documents into a LiquidText project and annotate and cross reference. There’s a separate work space outside of the documents where you can store clippings and collect summaries.

It’s great for reading long standard documents and cross reference between them and supporting material like examples etc.

[1]: https://www.liquidtext.net/

I've really been enjoying a remarkable tablet since I got it a few weeks ago. Great for taking notes, great for reading pdf's (and scribbling on them - which is surprisingly useful!), terrible for literally anything else.

> terrible for literally anything else

I hope it will soon be the best e-reader on the market, thanks to KOReader[1].

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/RemarkableTablet/comments/jsb3r7/ko...

Hopefully, but I don't like counting features before they exist.

A feature that does exist - and I maybe should have mentioned, is that one of my house mates finds it really useful for remote teaching, they screen share the remarkables screen to their students and use it as something like a blackboard.

That does sound like a remarkable tablet. What's it called?

(...oh, now I get it: <https://remarkable.com/>)

I love reMarkable 2 for note-taking, but the fact that internal links in PDFs cannot be traversed makes it a non-starter for me as a technical document reader.

Is it a good ebook reader if you're not a prolific note taker?

It renders PDFs, let's you scale/move where on the screen the page is rendered, let's you flip through pages, let's you switch to a view of page thumbnails, let's you go to a page number, remembers the last page you were on.

If you expect more from your ebook reader than that, it is not just because of software.

As a sibling comment mentions that might be fixed soon. V1 had long since had support for third party apps. V2 is taking a bit of time (because controlling eink screens in weird) but will probably have third party apps support soon. At that point you will be able to use one of the well known open source ebook reading apps.

Edit: And to be clear, all the third party app support is unofficial, the help menu on the tablet includes the ssh password for root, everything past that is just reverse engineering (it's a pretty typical linux system apart from the display).

I use an ipad pro for reading pdf textbooks. The high refresh rate screen makes it more pleasant to use than the android tablets I’ve tried. Also the iOS books app is great, if a little bloated by the store half

A computer.

I started off my "learning more than what you get taught in school" reading PDFs on a tiny phone, I now do it on a bigger phone, a big DPI monitor etc. none of these platforms makes a blind bit of difference to me because my eyes aren't the bottleneck.

iPad Pro, 10”.

Would you be happy with some kind of paginated image file format, if it were not significantly larger than PDF?

Oppositely what I absolutely WANT - is web page like format with auto-flowing text and something that fits to the screen with user styling/typesetting. I wish both option is available.

Markdown/Asciidocs/reStructured Text :)

Yes, honestly HTML or its subset is enough for me but some author/publisher publishes only ePub or PDF.

I agree completely. Have you found any good resources for acquiring books in pdf?

LibGen, SciHub