Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by makkesk8 1174 days ago
The way pdf has become a standard in everyday life is truly disgusting.

One is expected nowadays to have a pdf reader installed on your device, this is a problem in it self because most of the software short of just reading the pdf, that are "free" does not include most of the features one would come to expect to utilize the standard. Now I don't have to sign pdf's daily but when you start a new job for instance and have to sign a pdf it becomes troublesome.

As a developer the ecosystem is pretty terrible too, in order to utilize said functions such as signing you'd need to fork out a huge chunk for a subscription to some library. Don't get me wrong, paying for software I'm all for but forcing your users to pay for some third-party software to interact with your documents is not fine.

To me, this is simply disgusting that you'd have to buy into this "standard" in every aspect, both as a user and as a developer.

We've come a long way over the years of having more options to both users and developers but honestly, it's simply not enough. And pdf as a format being very complex it's more than understandable that it would be a challenge to make it more available.