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Old 05-27-2011, 12:39 AM   #49
toddos
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Join Date: May 2010
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Quote:
Originally Posted by AnemicOak View Post
No kidding, but I was responding to his comment that PDF should never ever be used for any reason for anything.
That's because it shouldn't

One of the biggest reasons that PDF proliferated as an ebook format is because publishers were lazy. They had the PDF files they sent to the printers, PDFs are digital, ebook!

It shouldn't work that way. PDF in this case is a transport mechanism, nothing more. Doing it this way is like saying (warning! bad analogy ahead!), "I can pay for something in person with a check. Therefore, I can take a picture of a check and send it to Amazon to pay for my online purchase." There are better ways of doing this, like direct deposit using routing numbers and accounts, or using a debit card, but because you happen to have this paper check that you used to use to pay for physical stuff in the physical world, you think that it should be good enough to take a picture of that to pay for stuff in the digital world.

The sad thing is, there are older, more mature, open, readable, convertible (hereby shortened to "better") formats for layout, like the previously-mentioned LaTeX, PostScript, etc. Printers used to accept those, and many (most?) still do, but Adobe products essentially monopolized the publishing industry just as Microsoft Office monopolized business communication, and so a printer who won't take PDFs is as useless as a lawyer who won't accept DOCs. Just because that's the way things are doesn't make them right or good, and just because PDF has proliferated doesn't make it right or good.

PDF needs to be demonized, like IE6 was demonized, or it will continue to push its brokenness on us even though there are much better formats.
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