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Comment by srvmshr | Hacker News Reader

They have become a reliable way in office & legal processes around the world in terms of fixed layouts & content immutability (in a sort of layman view. Knowing Acrobat Pro exists & PDF editing too - but I'd argue that in majority of cases its not as trivial as modifying text file or markup sources, with intention to change or forge).

Correct me if wrong but Word/LibreOffice layouts could change depending on the machine & version number - but with PDF you get what you intended to show. I think that has always been the winning proposition for PDF

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https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

PDF/A is made especially for archival and long term preservation

It's just a useless label on the cover. PDF/A is nothing but a subset of PDF without proprietary expandability limited to what is considered to “work everywhere” when dealing with common printed matter. It adds nothing to non-existent error handling rules or parsing strategies. There are 5 different ways for an object to be found undefined/nil, but the specification is silent on whether there's any difference in meaning or handling based on the level it happens. Therefore libraries and tools do what they find most suitable, and anything generated by the numerous easy-to-use sites is potentially not quite the same as originally uploaded.

PDF resembles the state of HTML years after HTML4, it barely says what should happen in the best case.

Word offers content immutability with its read-only mode, not sure how much layout change there is, though how much pixel perfection do you need in legal processes that are mostly pure text?

If you have a 300-page legal document, and other sources reference passages, e.g., a paragraph on page 234. It would be unreliable if over the years or depending on the viewer it moves to another page.

that's why legal documents number the paragraphs, otherwise it's unreliable over the days you edit the document, no need to wait years for the app to change layout

Isn't the solution to that not to fix your document’s pixels, but rather to have auto updating references (a la LaTeX)?

Does read-only mode not suffer from some global settings? Also, what happens when the reading instance doesn't have all the used fonts for example?

What global setting?

Nothing happens, embedded fonts feature isn't exclusive to PDFs

Sometimes vital images disappear and the layout gets messed up. I haven't had that happen to me with a pdf.

Though keep in mind that a given PDF might not embed the font that it uses (the PDF creator might not even have the legal right to embed whatever font they're using), so opening a PDF on other machines can cause them to be messed up if those machines don't have the correct fonts installed.

If you want literally pixel-perfect layout, you need to use a raster image format like PNG.

PDF is a container. You can put TIFF images, one per page, into the file

What version of word. PDF has many free implementations for both reading and writing.

Ever observed how legal documents, product documentation, books etc., are typeset - with exact placement of comment boxes, US code reference/legal disclaimers/ barcode, precise footnotes or margin notes. Many of those are meant to be also machine readable when printed out. Exactness is a very pressing need.

I would recommend taking a good look again. It might answer you why it is preferred in some situation to be typeset in PDF over a format where text could reflow.

About the immutability in Word, it seems optional & not something by design. You can edit any *docx & 'Save it as' back. This feature doesn't absolve immutability as a principal feature.

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