US Government stumbles over PDF document

[Colin Dunstan]

More PDF-related news for today: The PDF file of US President Bush's Strategy for Victory in Iraq speech contains hidden in the document's properties the name of Peter Feaver, a Duke University political science professor.

The discovery that Feaver was the originator of the plan has stirred controversy in Washington. The New York Times has reported that Feaver co-authored an analysis of surveys regarding the popularity of the Iraq war with the American public and concluded that citizens will support the war, despite fairly heavy casualties, as long as they believe it will ultimately succeed.

My humble advice to the government: ban Adobe PDF and advocate open standards instead.

[via GCN]

[rmeister0]

Oh come on! That's not "hidden" if it is part of the document properties.

Do not confuse user negligence with defects in the software used.

[Bob Russell]

MS made changes to MS Office documents also because it caused a lot of users to publish documents that had change history and old version contents which the user didn't know about. Last I heard MS acknowledged the problem and was making changes so that users would not fall into that trap as easily. It has caused some quite embarrassing slipups.

I share Colin's sentiments against pdf. Not so much because it's bad at what it does, but because it's a bad format for ebooks and for a lot of web content. The software has some DRM that has gone from ugly to worse. (For example, I believe new versions allow "after the fact" restrictions and monitoring of your usage.) It's also a big pain to wait for pdf docs to load... why else would there be frequent "pdf warnings" on web pages. And it's hard to read on mobile devices with small screens. The mobile software is scarce, and those that do exist are only adequate. Even some great software like Repligo, which is slick and solid software and maybe even the best, but still due to pdf format it's not pleasant to read many pdf documents.

But for exact replication of complicated documents page by page (which is the very property that seems to make it hard to read on small screens), I have to admit it's actually pretty good. Maybe not the best technology, but pretty darn good for a standard.

So I guess I'm agreeing with both of you. To pick on pdf for the comment field is maybe a bit, well, picky. But a valid complaint. And I also see the frustration, especially in the mobile world, over the limitations of pdf documents and the DRM associated with it. That frustration is certainly going to spill over in a lot of ways when other limitations pop up. And I'd say rightly so, because we are squarely in the camp of mobile computing, and pdf does not appear to be a good mobile solution.

Not sure if that all makes any sense, but it felt good to express it nonetheless!

[Jaapjan]

The problem with PDF and word and many such documents is part of a more prevailing phenomenon that is appearing in the computer world. As more and more data storage capacity appears and the network grows more and more is being stored for 'convenience'. Search technologies also make data findable in entirely new ways to accomodate this massive data growth. Nowadays, you cannot move on your computer without leaving a significant trail around. A pity. Word author fields are but an example.

[Antoine of MMM]

Dang; yall make good points about the PDF format and I just released a mag in that format. Guess I will hav eto figure into doing something more XMLDocs like for the next release. Thanks for the heads up thuogh. I knew PDF was bad, but if that bad, another format will have to be chosen.

[rmeister0]

Originally Posted by BobR

I share Colin's sentiments against pdf. Not so much because it's bad at what it does, but because it's a bad format for ebooks and for a lot of web content.

PDF was not original designed for reading maleable documents or on portable devices - something html/xml is much better at - which I think is partly why there is a paucity of good pdf readers for mobile devices.

I use Acrobat rather a bit for producing image scans of old paperbacks with crappy glue binding that are falling apart. I don't have the time or the inclination to go through an OCR process to convert them into a more politically correct format, and these files work very well with tablet-style devices. Lately I've been reading them on my Lifebook P1510 (a device I hope to review in more detail when time permits).

For this application it works very well, but I have no illusion that it is an ideal ebook format. Clearly it is not, but it wasn't originally intended to be. But I can't think of a file format better suited to collections of multiple images you'd want arranged in an arbitrary format with contents, an index, bookmarks, etc.

[willgoss]

PDF whether Acrobat, PDFCreator of produced from open office includes the properties page.

With PdfCreator and OpenOffice Writer you can modify the properties or document information as you print it.

The best is never get your name in the properties page on the word processor used for exporting to others. I use open office for all documents of this type......

[goblinbox]

The PDF format, IMO, is for printing. It does nothing else well.

Oh, wait. Lemmie take that back. It's a nice format for submitting one's résumé when job hunting online.

But other than those two things, it's a non-wonderful format for actually electronically encoding any kind of data!

I have no idea why any ebooks were ever offered in PDF format beyond the publisher's ignorance and/or laziness of word-friendly formats. Word wrap, hello?