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Comment by m463 | Hacker News Reader

I guess I am a publisher - I make PDF files all the time with my scanner (or ios notes scanner function)

I also love to get .pdf manuals of all the things I buy. I do not want to crawl through someone's website with chat popups and other engagement techniques to find out how to use or fix what I already purchased. Some of them are 40 years old, but as readable as new ones.

I also have lots of things like financial documents I've received that are identical and readable even 20 or more years later.

Although it isn't the cool-thing-of-the-day, I think pdf has its place.

It might be like phone/laptop users vs server users. Most people with a phone or laptop want the new best hot updated thing immediately. The server folks want nothing to change, ever.

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An HTML document can be plain text, and the sorts of documents you're referring to should be. I didn't say I wanted _websites!_ I just want content in a simple text-based format, not an inflexible more-or-less-binary blob.

> I make PDF files all the time with my scanner

In a hypothetical world without PDFs, wouldn't images work just as well for this? It's not like scanners are creating the same typographic layout etc. as a publisher needs to do when they send documents _to_ a printer?

For the scanned documents, I used to compressing them with jbig2 as one of the post-processing steps.

Representing the pages as big images not only takes more space to store/archive, but also increases IO-time for loading the documents.

HTML is terrible for mixed media. I have tried to save web pages over the years, and invariably it is a mess.

I have some old ones, they were root document plus a directory full of loose gifs and jpegs.

I tried .webarchive but nothing can read it but the original browser.

Images of pages would be more of the same. You'd probably end up with a bunch of loose gif/jpg/png/tiff filee, one per page, or some semi-supported multi-image file.

Go a step further and strip the HTML down to rich text down to Markdown and store that.

Then you can much more easily theme or site gen your PKB.

Pdfs just aren't good at big manuals. It's like opening an old dictionary. I prefer a wiki like hierarchy of hyperlinks with many documents. Just my 2c

What is it about PDF that makes it more suitable than HTML for any of these uses? HTML created 20 years ago will still be rendered the same. HTML doesn't require chat widgets.

HTML relies on the browser default style sheet which changes over time and it's browser specific.

Not a huge thing, but enough to break the page layout.

Pixel-perfect layout shouldn't be a goal for the kind of content that needs to be accessible, durable, etc. PDFs rely on your monitor's colour grading. In fact, allowing a reader to reformat the content to suit their needs is a benefit of HTML, not a drawback.

HTML is much less durable than PDF (25 year old PDFs still render the same. 25 year old HTML certainly doesn't.)

HTML relies just as much on your monitor's colour grading as PDF does.

(Your other arguments stand well enough.)

I have HTML documents from 25 years ago that are perfectly readable.

The render as I wish. ie are readable.

You can also completely override the browser style sheet. That is the idea of CSS ..

This is the benefit of HTML.

The reader can alter its format e.g. change font and the result still works. (agreed that it needs to be decent HTML - but plain HTML works it is some of the complexities that make this not work and I consider that a bad HTML page)

PDF is fixed format and you can't increase font size to make it more readable.

However for some of those use cases then not being able to alter PDFs is a benefit - e.g. invoices and bank statements but then you probably need more than a plain pdf which can be edited (e.g. change a 1 to a 9) but a pdf with some integrity checks.

This is a nightmare for people who produce actual print materials. My SO is a print designer doing mostly packaging design but also does some trade show materials. There is an incredible amount of thought in layout that can almost be considered branding for a company. Additionally, the static nature of print allows you to do complex layouts that wouldn't be translatable to HTML, let alone support different rendering engines, browser sizes, etc.

Many times even things like page or column breaks are extremely intentional. Having something "beneath the fold" or flowing onto another page can drastically change the way someone interacts with the piece of media. No PDF isn't great (my particular beef is with how there's almost no sense of a sentence, block, paragraph etc so it makes it almost impossible to copy or parse for text), but keep in mind that HTML/CSS only just reached near-parity in features in the past 5-6 years.

This is why I specified originally "as someone who isn't a book or magazine publisher". A bit too specific, but I meant to head off the discussion before it got to your SO, who has legitimate needs very different to my own.

I'm talking about documents which are purely valuable for their content, not for their branding, and where the reader's accessibility is more important than the creator's design.

I totally agree but the important phrase here is "produce actual print materials"

Reading on an electronic device is a different problem than providing something to be printed on a fixed format unchangeable piece of paper.

Thus you have different formats for the two different requirements. The issue is people keep trying to mix them up.

This has been useful for me https://www.manualslib.com/

You can make a PDF have 200 pages of ads too you know :P

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