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Comment by ramon156 | Hacker News Reader

Can we not have an alternative to PDFs? I get that they're more standardized but why would everyone let adobe have the hammer for a file type that's so important

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We quite agree on this - but getting a new alternative out will require a significant critical mass before it can be of any interest. While PDF has its challenges, it remains a light portable format and its security features make it a good fit for binding documents. The ecosystem, although it is dominated by Adobe, also includes other major players and existing integrations.

The way we look at it is PDFs allows embedding of other files and metadata. It is easy to provide a platform where we can enrich PDFs to display different contents than the one in the PDF itself. If this gets interesting enough, we can then phase out the PDF in the first place. But this is a long way ahead.

PDF is an open format in the sense that you don't need to pay Adobe a license fee for generating PDFs, or for reading and rendering PDFs. The format is fully documented, although the specification is controlled by Adobe.

For supply chain workflows the ASC X12 Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) industry standard works much better than PDFs. Unfortunately, despite being around for decades in has only been adopted by forward thinking organizations such as Walmart. Most smaller companies and their vendors still haven't implemented EDI.

https://developer.walmart.com/home/us-edi/

Insanity.

EDI is the only place where people are regularly still paying for message by the kilobyte, where unsecured FTP over the open internet is still a norm, and where entire cottage industries exist to support AVOIDING using EDI.

Source: I work in EDI. it's a pain in the rump.

Also, EDI is really only good for things like PO's, shipping notices, invoices, sales orders, etc.

> Also, EDI is really only good for things like PO's, shipping notices, invoices, sales orders, etc.

Don't forget health insurance claims, eligibility & benefits, and prior auth requests!

EDI is used in a lot of situations for machine-to-machine communications, but outside USA I believe EDIFACT is much more used (X12 is mostly used in USA).

Today many EDIFACT documents have been converted to ebXML: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EbXML

Source: Worked in EDI for a few years

You don't have to pay for message by the kilobyte. This is only true if you use an external vendor for the conversion or use a VAN for transmission: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Value-added_network

Source: Worked in EDI for a few years

you absoultely don't need to use a VAN, yet a LOT of people do. Even when they're not using a VAN for comms, they might pay a VAN to host their FTP. The whole thing is backasswards.

PDF is an incredibly (stupidly) extensible format. There are tons of government forms that (sadly) bake in complex workflows into PDF forms.

Given that the whole world has been running on PDFs for decades it's makes more sense to leverage the existing infrastructure and move it towards something more functional over time. Introducing a new format will just lead to another format the achieves 0.5% marketshare and then is abandoned after a few years. Microsoft basically forcing people to use XPS in windows (>70% market share of computing) still wasn't able to achieve meaningful usage or change.

I expect that PDFs will not go away for 20 years at least, but who knows

Yeah let's give XPS another go.

Giving credit where it's due, I can appreciate Microsoft for introducing XPS as an alternative to pdf.

There was a time, when not every software had "export to pdf". So, having a "print to pdf" meant installing (often pirated) Adobe Acrobat or installing a sketchy free(ware) printdriver software downloaded from sourceforge.

MS adding xps print driver to windows enabled sharing docs consistently (within windows ecosystem) without resorting to hacks.

I don't know why it didn't catch up. May be it was the general mistrust of anything MS, it arrived too late or it was something else.

Indeed, we need to give credit to MS for what they did. However, it didn't catch up as you mentioned, maybe due to timing, skepticism toward MS, or the complexity of moving from Adobe to MS for PDF management. I will dig a bit into it and come back later if I find anything interesting.

Thank you!!!

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