Alternatives to PDF

Why aren't people using HTML instead of PDF these days?

Also, what is a Sumatra-like reader for non-Windows and non-Macintosh systems?

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You seem to be confused. HTML is a markup language. PDF is a binary file format. They are not interchangeable technologies.

I wish we had went with PDF instead of HTML/CSS to be honest. In the early days of the web, pages always looked disgusting compared to their pdf equivalents.

HTML5 and XHTML5 deprecate PDF tbqh fam.

People use both PDF and HTML to share documents so why is it a problem in comparing the two?

*to compare

- Sent from my Acrobat

Does anyone seriously use Adobe's PDF reader in 2017?

Yes sadly. It is embedded in Every cancerous software bundle for work.

Parts of HTML's and PDF's goals are polar opposites.
HTML aims to be representable everywhere, and makes no assumptions about the availability of images or the preferred representation of emphasis, for example.
PDF aims to be represented exactly the same everywhere, like a printed document.

Just embed the images onto the HTML file using base64 encoding.
That's done via CSS.

pdf looks the same on any device

You don't understand. How will embedding them with a base64 encoding or CSS do anything when I'm using lynx?
HTML deliberately leaves a lot to the client. If the page doesn't use CSS or the browser doesn't support CSS then it's up to the browser to decide how to display text in tags. If the browser doesn't support images or the user chose to disable images that's fine, just show the alt text. And so on.
PDF was designed from the ground up to have only one rendering. HTML was designed from the ground up to allow multiple renderings.

Can PDFs be used with assistive technologies?

And you shouldn't be using tags since they're the same thing as tags. Just specify bold text in CSS.

>And you shouldn't be using tags since they're the same thing as tags. Just specify bold text in CSS.
is for emphasis, the browser decides how to express emphasis. It will most likely get styling information from the CSS or user a default, but it could done something else as well. A screen reader would let the listener know that something is emphasized via an audible cue. If you use the browser has no idea that your intention is to emphasize the text.

Depending on the PDF, sure. With the right text and the right PDF "pdftotext file.pdf | espeak" would work. But it's not something PDF is good at, or even tries to be good at. Its goal is looking the same everywhere, which somewhat conflicts with anything that tries to convert it to a different form. PDF is all about presentation, not semantics. It's for parsing by humans, not programs.
>And you shouldn't be using tags since they're the same thing as tags. Just specify bold text in CSS.
is the semantic way to go. It tells the browser what you mean. The modern web is getting less and less semantic though.

Someone finally explained to me the practical differences between emphasis and bold in HTML. Thanks.

Read the fucking wiki: wiki.installgentoo.com/index.php/List_of_recommended_GNU/Linux_software#Document_readers

Most offices use it including the one I work at

They're either shitty or stupidly complicated to use:
GTK3ware, therefore shit.
Lots of KDE dependencies. UX is not very nice.
Keyboard-driven mess. It's a document viewer, people want to view documents and have quick access to stuff like search and zoom; not to learn 9001 shortcuts.
Nobody uses Mothif anymore.
Ported from Plan9. Needs to be compiled.

Atril is the only semi-decent GNU PDF reader, and it's basically GTK2 Evince. It isn't as comfy and quick as SumatraPDF or has as many options as Adobe's reader, however.

People also use paper to share documents. Be sure to add that to your comparison.

...

But paper sticks out in the comparison.

Its like you hate latex, what is wrong with you?

I am pretty sure the epub and chm formats used for ebooks are actually envelopes for html documents.

Does fidelity really matter that much?

Yes. It's PDF's main attraction, not just an incidental property.
If I send you a .doc or .docx or .odt there's no guarantee it will come out right when you open it. You might not be running the same version I am, or not even the same program.
If I send out a HTML page it's practically guaranteed that some of the people who open it will see something different from what I see.
But if I send out a PDF file everyone gets to see the same document. No more headaches.

pdf is cancer.

That's not true, because I've come across PDF that expects the OS to have a special font and it's not there. So xpdf prints a warning in the terminal and then just substitutes another font.
I only use xpdf too, unless I'm using pdftotext.

You can embed fonts in PDFs.

I assume you mean bitmap image formats.
They have larger file sizes than PDF, don't let you extract text content, don't subdivide into pages, take longer to render, take more memory to render, and always have a limited resolution, among other things.

And they didn't, so it didn't look exactly like it was supposed to. They simply assumed I was running Windows or something with that special font.

if you want something to the same every use images. otherwise use markdown/html/latex whatever. pdf is cancer.

What the fuck? Do you publish literal .tex files for people to read?

I'm surprised that no one, has mentioned djvu as an alternative, it's Uriel approved!

Because apparently it's more prestegious to spend 10 seconds to open a document you found on Google in an external application which is even more bloated and buggy than the web browser itself.

an utterly pointles goal

>then add that class to a in your text to make a word emphasized
this is what redditors actually believe

...

okay, so instead of merely typing
>you are a faggot
or the more politically correct
>you are a faggot
we type out this every time:
>you are a faggot

HTML is for structure, not formatting.

That's not CSS any more.
Embedded CSS is CSS in tags in the document .

What I posted is inline CSS, as a reply to . Embedded CSS is stupid as well, and so is linking to an external style sheet. CSS is retarded period.

okay, you passed your certified webshotter class, now go to HN and join your peers

actually you write
>you are a faggot

sure why not?

PDF is better for anything you may want to print out onto paper.

There is nothing wrong with CSS.

So is suicide.

dvi is obsolete gramps you need to upgrade to hdmi

t. freech

I'd rather wonder why people use HTML instead of something like PDF (not the PDF itself).

I think web documents being in some kind of a binary vector format would be much better than this XML cancer, that on top of being poorly designed wastes space on its syntax.

At least use PostScript.

FirecucksOS tried and failed already

I use plain old text as much as possible. But very minimal HTML is ok, without CSS or later shit piled on. Other similiar lightweight hypertext is ok too (AmigaGuide and such).

Try Markdown or reStructedText (like MD, except better), they are practically plain text except with rules so that they can be parsed by a machine. The document can then be converted to some lower-level format like HTML or LaTeX (which is then compiled to PDF). I write in reST whenever I can, it's really nice format that looks great even when read as plain text.

no thanks. i will keep using Textile (txstyle.org/)

Fuck off you cancerous summernigger

Because HTML still isn't standardized, user-friendly tools for authoring it still don't exist, and web browsers are still all disgusting dysfunctional garbage compared to every other type of software.


DJvu's big advantage over PDF is its superior ability to handle scanned documents, by automatically slicing content into separately compressed OCR'd text, vector, and bitmap graphics, instead of trying to JPEG everything.


This. "Human readable" markup is an oxymoron, and has directly contributed to the decay of HTML/CSS separating content and presentation into the degenerate blob it currently is, with each webpage having its own (single) CSS file glued to it.

What would come closest to the original vision for HTML is something like FrameMaker for editing, and a compact binary markup format for distribution.

HTML5 is standardized and trivial to use. What you want is a design tool that makes it easy to visually design HTML pages. You confusion is in the fact that HTML5 was never intended to deal with visual design.

Nah, it's not standardized, not with Google/Apple attempting to finish off Gecko and Edge by pushing tags and nonstandard behaviors.

Soon, the HTML "standard" will be Blink's source tree, and all bugs will permanently become features.

Oh shit, 10 years from now you will have some upstart DOM that will advertise "Blink Bug Compatible!"

This is one bad timeline friendo.

HTML does one thing, PDF does another thing. Anti-spam bump 7.

PDF5 and xPDF5 would have been better tbqh fam. :'^)

Hyper-Text Markup Language and the Portable Document Format serve completely different use cases.

yeah. pdf serves absolutely no purpose and it still fails at it. also it is an absolute security nightmare.