💾 Archived View for yujiri.xyz › software › pdf.gmi captured on 2022-07-16 at 14:28:59. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

View Raw

More Information

⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-03)

➡️ Next capture (2023-01-29)

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

yujiri.xyz

Software

PDF must die

PDF is a blight and if you distribute PDFs you are making the world a worse place and more importantly, making me angry.

Some of the problems with PDF are symptomatic of a stubborn archaism, an attempt to bring the quirks and limitations of physical paper into the digital world:

Now, you might say these things actually do make sense for the rare use cases of printing to physical paper (the vast majority of such cases are themselves stubborn archaism). But if that's your only use, you wouldn't want to *distribute* documents in this format (as is often done), you'd want to only convert them to PDF as part of the printing process.

Some of the problems are shared with the web:

The Web is Evil

Other problems:

Replacements

Honestly with half the PDFs I run into, there's no real reason they couldn't have been plain text files. Most of the remainder would be better off as HTML files - they reside on the web anyway so being a PDF is just a pointless bit of friction (or a lot of friction if the user's browser doesn't display PDFs automatically).

A common case I see PDFs is legal shit. Government needs to be abolished and even besides any consideration of ethics virtually everything about all those institutions is stupid and broken and should be completely rethought.

Why you should be an anarchist

contact

subscribe via RSS