File, Unfortunately, Found

I don’t understand this. I guess this is because QC is maybe set in the future? PDFs are still very widely used.

Christopher Wolfe

Their biggest problem is that they can range from really good to really horrible, and it depends entirely on how they're authored. Even Adobe's own Acrobat software is not immune to creating glitchy content. Overall, I like the format, but I've seen some horrible examples.

awgiedawgie

As a mac user who makes broad use of Preview, I can confirm that adobe is horrible. Granted I'm paying apple tax, but I have free access to all of the paid features of Adobe.

Julienne Ignace

This is legit the first time I've ever heard someone to complain about pdfs. What's wrong with them?

Alia Åsten

what...what's wrong with PDFs? I'm a music teacher, so something like 80% of the files on my computer are PDFs of sheet music or handouts for my students, and I have no idea what a reasonable alternate file type would be.

Nichole

▲ This. "Please do not print a Word Document, scan it as an image, and save it as a PDF." *next document produced is just the same*

William Burns

PDFs are not the problem. The slack-jaws that produce 99% of PDF files are the problem.

James Dore

LaTeX is likely still readable in the future.

James Dore

its weird its not in LaTeX instead of PDF for science use

Ariel Rosenfeld

the adobe tools are a good reason PDF sucks PDF seems to work better when not using adobe tools

Ariel Rosenfeld

Doesn’t everyone have an abacus and a Sanskrit dictionary in the closet?

KCkittysnores

It's easy to extract JPEGs from PDFs, at least on Linux.

Larry

Soufflés are 508-compliant?

Larry

I wonder if Jeph anticipated this would be the most commented comic in recent history 🤔

Sean Kau

name a better format that more or less looks the same on multiple OS, can be used in the press, aint word, can be easily digitally signed, and widely supported (by users).

I doubt anyone can read that aside PT410X

What about PostScript? 😆

Jonas

I love PDFs 😆😅

PDFs are like soufflés - created with the proper training, to standards, they can be lightweight, 508-compliant, and are a standard way of creating signable material that can't be altered. Sadly, most people don't know how to create them properly and they fail.

William Burns

PDF? more like WTF!

Brooke Vibber

I hate PDFs so much. And I rarely use the word "hate" for anything. They are slow to load, bulky in size, hard to read on mobile devices, and have massive accessibility issues. Even worse are people who print documents (or have a printed document that's so old, nobody knows where it came from or who made it) and scan it to create a PDF copy. WE KILLED FLASH, PDF DOCUMENTS NEED TO BE NEXT!!!

Terra the Lioness

I had to do contract negotiation work for Verizon Business for 3 years. I worked exclusively in PDF format, scanning old billing agreements from companies and state government in the mid-Atlantic region. I LOATHE the PDF format.

VGreenGoblinV

Jeph, you don't hate PDFs nearly as much as I do. I don't think it's possible that anyone does. I hate them with the passion and heat of ten thousand suns, more than the gravity of a hundred super black holes. They are a blight.

Mooster

Heh. When my company got bought out and our operational reporting department merged with the purchasing company's, me and some of my co-workers in that group were having our first discussion with our new boss, who informed us that their web reporting platform was developed primarily in ColdFusion. "ColdFusion?" asked one of my co-workers. "Huh. Is the documentation in Latin?"

Scott Christian Simmons

better than an xml file i suppose

The shorts!!

schmod

This is exactly how I envisioned it would be trying to communicate with Hannelore's father

Bagge

I don't even know if Nelson is joking or not!

Nick Hodgson

Read: free. Edit: kidneys

Da Nargh!!

I work in a photolab and the amount of people that come in with photos that have ended up in PDF format somehow, especially around Christmas, is insane. We aren't set up to read PDF's at all so we always have to send them elsewhere

Jay Cottrell

Winslow might be the cutest character you've ever drawn????

what a bright future they live in, without Adobe

BeatButton

And let me guess: Because those are extensions, they're not part of the open spec, so the non-Adobe readers can't open them, right?

Brooks Moses

I ran a dialup modem connection over a VOIP device for a year or two, because I was a student and the university had free dialup and the local fiber-internet company was selling VOIP-over-fiber-to-the-apartment plain-old-telephone service that was notably cheaper than their internet service. It was, ironically, some of the best dialup reliability I've had.

Brooks Moses

1, it's inefficient. 2: People can easily misuse it(I've gotten PDFs that my work comp literally can't print without crashing because they were generated so badly). 3: Adobe has a stranglehold on the industry, so if you want to send any sort of a multi-page document, you better pony up for their software, because your company's clients won't read anything else.

Viktor

Dafuq's wrong with PDF?

This seems to finally answer a question I've been wondering for a while about the state of standard technology in the QC world. I've always imagined that if I were to walk into Coffee of Doom and ask for the Wi-Fi password, everyone would give me confused looks about why I use technology so old. Alternatively, my device would use 802.11n and their router would be on 802.11א or some equivalently futuristic version.

Alex H.

I love the results, when I create pdf documents in LaTeX. Only problem is, that *editing* them requires a bit of software that costs more than I generally want to pay

Hedgie

Doesn't everyone have strong opinions on text file formats?

Marc Pengryffyn

Also, why is a man that is on the cutting edge of technology using a format that is outdated in their universe?

Curtis Cahoon

PDF is a good format for business, universally readable that doesn't lose format and harder to manipulate than a simple word format and makes great fillable and signable forms.

Curtis Cahoon

Oh! It's so much worse than that! Adobe charges people to include support for their attachment formats in Adobe Reader. That's the point: this page can include your special format for whatever it is you sell, and you can expose it to the masses in a PDF for the nominal fee of a quarter million dollars.

Kyle Rudy

The PDF is a fantastic scam. The basic file format is milquetoast whatever, but it's indefinitely extensible for whatever modules and internal attachments you care to dream up. It can theoretically be a wrapper around anything. So, this is adobe's business model: popularize their document format, then charge to include _your_ format reader in the official adobe reader. If, for instance, you have a proprietary format for some obscure type of schematic, you can pay them $250,000 and they'll include it in adobe reader. Then, instead of forcing your clients to vet, download, install your proprietary reader, you can just put the schematic in a PDF and send it to them. For enterprise customers, that's so much easier and cheaper that a quarter-mil is a steal. This is why the adobe reader is huge, slow, and riddled with security vulnerabilities. It's nothing but a bundle of proprietary dserializers thinly veiled with a document reader, and the more people fall for the scam, the easier the scam is to sell as the "universal" document solution.

Kyle Rudy

Us academics feel personally attacked 😆

I like PDF for forms. And nothing else.

Carl Fink

Worst ebook format.

Omenrose

PDFs are a great thing when you don't want some less-than-tech-savvy user mutilating a document or a customer screwing with something in order to support some kind of bogus legal threat in order to avoid payment. Not that I speak from bitter experience or anything.

Hugh Eckert

No, non-searchable PDFs for web site content like restaurant menus are the best. Should be a shooting offense.

Tudza

Who could have guessed that Jeph's readers would have strong opinions about text file formats.

Chris Heg

PDFs are best for official documents.

The World Famous Chocomerican

PDFs that are nothing more scanned images of text are the BEST.

Gary Huntress

I work at a magazine. PDFs all day every day. Way waaay better than Word docs.

Michelle Gawe

I find it hard to believe that a charity wouldn't have some kind of ridiculously outdated word processing program capable of opening an obsolete file format.

Dean Reilly

When working at a company that sold soft- and hardware packages for inspection and verification purposes ten years ago, I wrote a PHP script that generated a PDF cost proposal from a webform. There were a bunch of fiddling bits, but I could control exactly what the end result looked like.

Czarzhan

When you're working with print, PDF is the way to go. It's literally the only thing Adobe has created that's benefited us.

Alcaria Swain

Oh god. I received a word file from my mom today … it was in Comic Sans.

Miyaa

You say that like it's a bad thing. Also, if your data processing needs are more complex than drawing a border around your table, then Excel is the wrong tool for the job. Fight me.

Simon Green

You're not alone.

Chuck Dee

As someone who worked professionally in the document printing and preparation industry I couldn't agree more.

Spacey02111

Judging from the comments, not just tou

Kajsa Anderson

The problem with PDFs is when they get poorly made or poorly prepared, ESPECIALLY if they use non-English characters and/or require you to fill them out. Otherwise, they've been a lifesaver in more circumstances than I care to count. Scan a document, turn it into a PDF, make it possible to fill out online, and the family member with s(YAY!)tty handwriting can complete an application!

z

Doesn't Bubbles have a military grade universal file translator installed?

Chris Heg

Anges, I work at an ISP who does VOIP faxes are our nightmare

Nicholas A Wagner

speaking of outdated technology, couldn't they put a fax machine on the space station? seems more cost-effective....

Peter McDevitt

There is a song, The Last Man To Buy DVDS, this makes me think of it

Nicholas A Wagner

I'd rather have a PDF instead of a Word doc. At least I know I'm going to see what the document creator intended with PDF instead of what the various Word viewers display (on a Mac and I don't use M$ products). Admittedly, i've never tried to create a PDF from scratch.

Pete Hanson

PDF is wayyyy better than what it replaced. It used to be PostScript and that's a programming language!

Sean Kau

PDF is really a quite misunderstood format. Much of the hate and issues around them is based on poorly implimented to create them. I'll take a PDF over a Word Doc any day.

Chris Gallaty

I’m thinking shortly after the singularity the woke AIs stormed and destroyed a certain mud walled named company to stop the insufferable amount of software updates.

William Foley

As a printer, I prefer PDF over shit like word due to the fact I don't have to worry about my computer not having the customer's font.

Kilonum

GOD please do NOT get me started on faxes I work as a pharmacy tech and I swear to fucking god, faxes

Agnes

I'm sure that as a former public servant, Basilisk has not only had to deal with PDFs, but also faxes.

Dave Van Domelen

PDF was, is, and remains, an electronic analogue of the printed page. It was a backward step. We should never have gone there and by now we really should have moved on.

I've been to BDSM clubs, and I've never seen a sadist go THAT hard.

Jennifer Doyle

Had a higher-up who would compose company-wide emails in Word, export to PDF, then have staff send out as an attachment to an email

Clark Wells

As much as PDFs suck, faxes suck more.

Jennifer Doyle

PDFs are also more difficult to make fully accessible (for screen readers, etc.)

And the telegraph, too.

Forgettable

Sadly, in the medical field, a lot of our protocols and certifications all get emailed around as PDFs to make sure they can be read and opened nearly everywhere, and can be digitally signed, if the sender is sufficiently tech-savvy(usually not)

Anthony Gaglianese

Hard disagree on that punch line, but that's just me.

As Reggie Jackson said, "They don't boo nobodies." Love it or hate it, PDF won the file format war. It will take a long time to unseat it.

David Johnson

I hate PDFs but only when they are used on websites as a replacement for regular HTML pages and especially when the website gives no clue that the link you are about to click on is a PDF. When I want to see a restaurant's menu or a government office's information about something, I don't want to click on a link, wait for a PDF to load onto my phone and litter up my downloads folder then pinch and zoom to see what it says.

Bruce Alan Horn

And I must support the users of this format, sadly. Gov't uses it pretty heavily because of the digital signature capability.

Gary Sumners

Meh. Let's have a go at the ashes.

BobC

PDF are much better as non-fillable indeed. Using Excel as a fillable form document seems also bad.

Miyaa

I’m trying to figure what other kinds of document formats are there that could be more well liked/hated than PDF.

Miyaa

Funny, I thought it was a Puerile Demolitions Foreman! Unfortunately, I see those all the time.

Dracon Atrox

I am apparently behind on my file format discourse

Dylan T

My hate for pdfs is growing to a similar level to my hate for crystal reports.

Scott Hilton

Cats

Spoogle McGee

My daily reports are on fillable PDFs. Everyone else's is Excel and only has one spot for info, but my group has to use PDF and enter the exact same information on 3-9 pages & sometimes up to 40x on a single page... And we can't just copy & paste or have it autofill because it's PDF & the info isn't always the same. I hate PDFs

J Andrade

Curious why the hate towards PDFs. Not for or against the format, honestly just curious.

Kaos7heory

Why so much hate?

As much as I’d like to, Winslow has to see his feelings for Roko through.

Andrea Andrew

Wow. Imagine that. A Pipsqueak Dentist Flosser! I haven't heard that file name in quite a while.

Bailey Tighe

Down with PDFs also that's awesome I'm not the only one that hopes they go the way of the teligraph

NomadicSoul

Aww I like PDF *hides from naysayers*

Bonnie Fiddis

Let me guess, one of the pizza delivery vehicles?

Michael Boettger

Can we ship Winslow & Beeps?

Miyaa