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shokwave comments on What Would You Like To Read? A Quick Poll - Less Wrong Discussion
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Comments (43)
If it comes to my attention, I really don't care, as long as it's discursive written text, i.e. not audio or slides.
What are people's objections to PDF? For me PDF has two advantages. A PDF can include complex mathematics, which most papers I read do. This is generally done badly or not at all in other media. PDFs are also self-contained: I can download a PDF and have the whole thing, which is not always possible with HTML. A downside is that they don't reflow to accommodate the window size, making them awkward to read on a phone, but most HTML is broken in that way as well (including e.g. LessWrong). I've little experience of other e-book formats.
Mostly moral objections, for me.
Like what? FYI, PDF hasn't been proprietary since 2008, and there are plenty of free/open source implementations of it.
The structure of the specification is gigantic, lengthy, and wrong-headed on many points. It's a file format but it tries to define details of how it should be viewed (!!!). It is bloated and inefficient. It moves things away from becoming efficient data - plain text becomes formatted or even a flat picture of words.
As an illustration of how messed up the spec is, even Adobe Photoshop commonly fails to render PDFs the same way as Adobe Acrobat.