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by abdullahkhalids 1205 days ago
PDF should be replaced... By a document format that displays statically rendered content in page size chunks, but with some of the backend problems removed.

Stuff like, embedding text in a way that improves accessibility and copying text works nicely. Being able to right click copy images would be also nice.

2 comments

Improving accessibility may be fair (I'm not familiar with the details), but in many cases PDFs are used for scenarios where the authors don't want the individual assets to be trivially extractable. Even if an advanced user can do so programmatically, a static layout is often a feature, not a bug. If the authors wanted the reader to be able to quickly pull out assets and recreate it they would distribute the content in some other format.
That's dumb, and pointless. Any image or text that is displayed on the screen will always be easily copied. There's no security in making copying an image take five clicks instead of two, it's just annoying. Not annoying because the five clicks are difficult or very time consuming, annoying because "why should I have to click 3 extra times just because someone foolishly thinks their content is being protected when it isn't". The analog hole is always there as a fallback too.

If someone wants something to be private, they shouldn't publish it. Once you put something out into the world, you should expect that people will do whatever they want with it.

Read-Only Docx solves pretty much all these issues.
Not really. Even Word for Windows and Word for Mac don't always render them identically, and in Office 365 it may be something else! And when you add LibreOffice Writer and the like into the equation, all bets are off.