Computers: I hate PDFs.

[mrwiseman]

I hate PDFs with all my might. Reasons:

● Closed, propietary, untrustworthy format
● Uber lame, uber slow, uber bloated Acrobat Reader shitware
● Edit only with expensive Adobe stuff which is probably more uber lame, uber slow, uber bloated shitware
● Gay copy protections
● Lame ass text copy even from "free" unprotected documents
● Can't copy vectors to clipboard even from "free" unprotected documents
● Adobe's queer style
● Can't convert to decent, open, standard formats
● The few utilities that work with PDFs cost a fortune and usually suck anyways, because of how closed and stupid the format is
● An equally complex HTML page with equally as precise position information is 30 to 60 times faster in any half-assed web browser than Acrobat Shitter renders it
● It sucks to read PDFs since they are ALWAYS rendered independent to your browse device
● Can't force your styles into the document you're reading, so if the font sucks, bad luck; if the colors suck, bad luck; if it has some stupid feature, bad luck; if it's a PDF, bad luck anyways.

Every time you make a PDF document, god kills a hot anime chick if you're a guy, and a hot anime bishounen if you're a girl. Remember!

<font color="#101010" size="1">[ November 02, 2004 06:54 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[Hell Knight]

Thx for the warning Wise, I'll keep it in my mind ^_^

[mythbreaker048]

I gues adobe had to make a living out of it ....

[mrwiseman]

Yeah, but they could still make money (and maybe some more) if they had better software (i.e. 50 times faster, twice as many features, and half the RAM consumption), and there were some decent utilities to convert to and from PDFs. Who needs PDFs anyways, having HTML+CSS2/3 which can be just as precise and way more versatile. Plus there's their gay copy protection: you can copy from a protected file, but only if you type it, just you can't use the clipboard. That's, of course, until you eMule for a proper utility.

[mythbreaker048]

now THAT's stupid.

[mrwiseman]

Here are some quotes from experts discussing the PDF format:

?Much has been said about PDF?s unfitness for onscreen reading. I need not and shall not reiterate it. I merely note that PDF is inextricably based on a ?page? unit. Unchangeable page boundaries are stupid. They are artifacts of the paper medium, meaningless in themselves, subject to change even among different editions of the same book.?

?My chief quarrel with PDF: it is a dead-end format; it as well as its inputs are utterly putrid for archival purposes. Once you have a PDF, you are not guaranteed to be able to back it out to anything useful.?

?The content tends to be big.?

?once something is in PDF it's finished. You can't change it after that.?

?PDF is a fad that everyone just uses because so and so uses PDF.?

?even if PDF has some useful purposes, is everything about it is useless.?

?One business uses PDF, so the next business should use it. When I go to google and see PDF websites, I purposely avoid them. Businesses are losing money from me because they are using PDF.?

?PDF detours customers and reduces sales?

?I want to buy, but why are you hiding information from me in pdf - I'd like to see the info now, not after I download.?

?You'd like to incur paper and ink costs, when the whole point of the web is free digital onscreen data. PDF defies this rule. OH, but PDF is a reader, remember.. nope, they call it a reader, but it's got blurry text and is hard to scroll, so it's actually made for printing. A bunch of confusion there. Not a good reader, called a reader, for printing, has postscript for big printers people don't have, portability but only portable to a super computer, so not portable.?

?They boast about printing, because it sucks as a reader?

?Reason a lot of people do not like PDF, is because it is slow on even new computers, old computers, any computers.?

?And now, because Sun uses PDF, another company will use it. They use it, so we must use it. They are big, follow them.?

?make room for the Boeing 747 Adobe bloat.?

?What is the PDF format good for? Short version: Nothing.?

?Some people don't want to have to print every document they receive just to to read them.? (I'd hate to do this, paper sucks; why waste money, kill trees and most surely lose something when I have a computer.)

????

The Portable Document Format is actually anything but portable, in the widest sense of the word. PDF sucks as much as PostScript (which, curiously, was another of Adobe's creations): it's a printer format, a dead end; something some lamers want to do but nobody wants to use.

I still remember, a bunch of years ago, when some magazine CD came with one of the first Acrobat Reader versions and example documents. My first question was, "Why? Why do they make it so I have to install this to view a document?". This question hasn't found any replies yet, and is even harder to reply now that HTML, XML, CSS and so on are widely used and are supported, open, useful, convertible, automatable, internationally regulated standards. Let's face it: PDF just sucks big cocks, it's worthless and useless.

I've never understood PDF just like I never understood PostScript much either. They both look like gay stuff for printing-oriented, copy-protection-oriented, fixed-format old fogeys to me.

Now some PDF suckers would come and say, "But man, PDF is for printing". Then why the fuck is it used for electronic documents and eBooks? Does the "Electronic" word ring a bell? Moreover, the only paper I ever want to see is toilet paper. I don't like printed stuff. I can't Control+F. I can't Verdanize. Papers are smaller than my screen. I can't copy&paste. I can't archive it and access it in a jiffy. I can't do anything. "But man you can read it in the train!" But man most of the time I'm at home or work and I have something invented 60 years ago called computer.

So yeah, every time you use PDF, god kills a kitten.

<font color="#101010" size="1">[ November 02, 2004 07:00 PM: Message edited by: -Wiseman- ]</font>

[mythbreaker048]

lol @ the last phrase. And yes it's useless ....

[justwildbeat]

Well I'm a kitten killer then. Bah I'm forced to use it since many profs send documents in pdf (by email). It's a pain because I have to wait for my pc to load the program and if I happen to click around too much the program freezes on me.

[mrwiseman]

Oh, then you're a fellow sufferer, not a kitten killer (killers are who use PDF as their format of choice i.e. the ones who create them). It's the same in my university. Long loading, bloated, slow scrolling PDFs, often copy&paste protected. Imagine what's copying a whole page of code by hand because the moron protected it "so other universities won't copy it" (first: they are public universities too and are paid with my taxes, and I don't want my money to be used inefficiently; second: like they would copy my teacher's half-assed docs).

[melfice]

Well, i never understood why to code every letter of the PDF document when if you write them down into a Postscript format, or the like, the size is smaller.

Pdf is a solution for a document format portable, right? why do it propietary? didn't we want it to be "PORTABLE"? (PDF means "Portable Document File")

For example, the DXF data format for 3D models IS really portable, it uses TONS of bytes (16 megs in front of 800 KB of a binary MAX file to store a 65000 polygons model right?) but it's portable, a DXF is open, everybody can write DXF cuz the designers wanted it to be so, and it's not encrypted, so you can read it perfectly, just fit yourself to the specifications the designers, and everything will go fine.

Now, PDF's are really a contradiction. They're supposed to be portable, but to make them, you need expensive aplications... Makes no sense for me.

What does not have the HTML format for it to be considered a "Portable Document Format"?...