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Comment by edoceo | Hacker News Reader

What would be really awesome is a PDF competitor. Put fonts, images, media in tables. Open spec so everyone can use.

Perhaps an ability to lock/sign?

You could do it with packed HTML, and run a little localhost web server to plug it into a browser.

HTML is a mess, but at least it's popular.

PDF is already a popular mess, and open. If you were going to reimplement on top of sqlite, the value would be from implementing it sanely.

PDF, unlike HTML, is inappropriate for most digital documents.

What happened to single-file HTLM formats ?

There's EPUB, but it has some shortcomings, like the lack of mp4/webm support...

> There's EPUB, but it has some shortcomings, like the lack of mp4/webm support...

As a PDF replacement, that seems like a good feature to exclude

Why ? Also, I'm not looking for a PDF replacement so much as an actual digital portable document format.

Html is a very complex "living standard" which arguably makes it unsuited for anything but web content.

PDF is an open spec--even though it is so complicated that there's only one complete implementation which costs money.

Meet PDF/A, a safe subset of pdf which enforces certain features and is suitable for archival:

PDF/A is in use in several government institutions already, and there are validators out there etc.

OpenXPS :)