PDF has always seemed to be a janky Adobe product.
Should a modern, open version of PDF be created knowing that how it evolved from the original concept in 1991? Shouldn't we at some point say, we need to start over and created PDF2?
Should a modern, open version of PDF be created knowing that how it evolved from the original concept in 1991? Shouldn't we at some point say, we need to start over and created PDF2?
I'm not claiming all of PDF's woes are related to its encoding, but it's not zero, either. Start from the fact that XML documents have XML Schema allowing one to formally specify what can and cannot appear where. The PDF specification is a bunch of English which makes for shitty constraint boundaries
And PDF is a subset of PostScript, the product that made Adobe and the DTP industry.
It's janky because the goal was to render identically everywhere. If you think it's easy look at the code abortion that is CSS.
Unfortunately in practice it would mean that everyone would have to support both PDF and PDF2.