[klint]

That objection, and others, are addressed in the project FAQ[1]. It's already possible to open and edit a PDF in various applications.

[1] https://editablepdf.org/faq/

>But isn’t the whole point of PDF that you can’t edit it? No. The fact that standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident than a feature, as PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form documents needed to be transmitted. Many people believe PDF to be “impossible to edit,” but beware: minor edits in PDFs, such as swapping figures on an invoice, are trivial — therefore you need other technologies, such as digital signatures, to verify that your PDFs have not been tampered with. More extensive edits, however, are more difficult, as they require the document’s logical structure to be automatically detected, and this is an error-prone task.

[...]

>Are you sure we need such a editable PDF format? I believe one of the most important benefits of PDF is its concrete, solid state. The idea of Editable PDF stems from a real-world need to improve the efficiency in the way that we work with documents. Today, the only editable file formats are those native to the applications that generated documents, and none of these formats guarantees the layout to be preserved in the same way as PDF. Furthermore, despite improvements in compatibility, using a native file format still often requires the recipient to be using the same software (and often the same version) of the application, which may not be available.

PDF’s largest asset, its rock-solid visual presentation, will remain, and editable PDFs will be backwardly compatible with the current installed base of PDF viewers such as Adobe Reader and Preview.

[kccqzy]

The FAQ explains things well: making minor changes, although difficult is still possible. I have even personally changed multiple PDFs; I find qpdf to be a great tool for that. But making changes large enough to require reflowing the text is almost impossible.

I do not consider my objection addressed. If anything, that FAQ further emphasized the current difficulty of editing PDFs and they are only proposing to make things easier. So no one is really objecting to the fact that currently changing PDFs is hard. Whether or not that is desirable though, is a separate matter, one that the FAQ does a poor job explaining.

[Angostura]

> The fact that standard PDFs are difficult to edit is more of an accident than a feature, as PDF’s roots are in printing, where only final-form documents needed to be transmitted.

I disagree with this - I was an IT journalist when PDFs came out and all the blurb at the time was centred around the advantage of being able to create a document and know that it could be displayed by anyone, irrespective of machine, OS etc while retaining visual fidelity.

PDF only became a thing in the print production world quite a bit later. For many years, you were making sure your printer got the QuarkXpress Files and all the high-res asset files collected together into a single folder and zipped up.

[tonyedgecombe]

PDF was based on PostScript, a system that was created for digital printers. The big selling point of PostScript was that your output would look the same whether you were printing on an Apple LaserWriter or a Linotype.

[Angostura]

Indeed. Postscript is great for printers. The fact that the PDF was created in addition was because a comparable system was needed for human eyeballs.