Comments on: No PDFs!

By: tshirtman

tshirtman — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 14:24:16 +0000

The main point is that pdf are “finished documents” it’s very difficult to manipulate the data inside, it’s a good thing to be able to produce them, but it’s a bad thing to have only that, what people need is the possibility to search the data and to produce the reports THEY want, to have some pdf is not a bad thing for people who wand general purpose information, but an API to query any independant information that would be in those pdf is the real needed thing.

Well, now I hope one day my country will take this step…

By: edogawaconan

edogawaconan — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 12:03:41 +0000

PDF has its place. Except if you’re suggesting sending documents in TeX format…

By: Vincent Manis

Vincent Manis — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 21:30:59 +0000

There’s a serious case of babies and bathwater here. Some PDF documents indeed can’t be searched, notably those that are scanned from paper documents. Others can be, and quite straightforwardly. Google does it all the time. So too do the PDF readers I normally use, Acrobat Reader, Mac Preview, and okular and evince on Linux. I find them just as easy to search as an HTML document, and easier to search than a tree of HTML documents.

Speaking as a document producer, I find PDF invaluable. I produce documents on computer science, and HTML handles math too poorly to be of any use to me.

But I spoke of babies and bathwater. It is essential to define a specific compliance level; I would recommend PDF 1.7, which is an ISO standard (please, no remarks about OOXML, the PDF standard is kosher), but maybe it’s too soon for that; perhaps an earlier level, say PDF 1.4, would support more software. It is quite reasonable to insist that PDF be searchable EXCEPT if it’s a scanned document (and no doubt software that searches such scanned documents will become practical eventually). It is also reasonable to insist that all DRM be turned off in the resulting document, so no password is needed to open the document, and it may reasonably be printed. But please, don’t take away a format that allows the producer to define the layout, use strange fonts that may not be on the consumer’s computer, and supports math, or chemical notation, or music.

By: rgz

rgz — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 18:27:25 +0000

@Gerald Ellis

Rubish, PDF can be edited by anyone.

By: Greg

Greg — Wed, 10 Jun 2009 15:39:57 +0000

I don’t understand why it is so common to equate the PDF file format with security. If I cannot edit your website then who cares if I cannot edit a file downloaded from it? And why do people seem to believe that PDF files are somehow edit resistant just because it costs money to buy editor software? Is this not true of MS Word documents as well?

And since this is public data regarding public money, should we not be able to take the files and edit them in order to perform analysis or combine them with other sources of data? Making them PDF files creates barriers that run counter to the reason for posting them in the first place.

By: P Roy

P Roy — Tue, 09 Jun 2009 20:56:09 +0000

1. I also, have found PDF files, thus far, to be easily accessible and resistant to being edited by just anyone.

2. The Senate should be held to the same levels of accountability as the House!

By: Gerald Ellis

Gerald Ellis — Mon, 08 Jun 2009 17:41:34 +0000

I have found PDF files to be easily accessed and downloaded. However, and I consider this an advantage, the can not be edited by just any one. I feel this will keep certain malicious acts from occuring in this high speed era.

By: Jim Gilliam

Jim Gilliam — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 20:29:13 +0000

We need to get through to the folks in government that PDF != transparency. In some ways it’s worse than print, because it lets them say the information is online, yet it’s almost totally inaccessible.