Important and well written article by Sydney Butler on How-To Geek: PDFs Must Die
❝PDFs were created as a way to give a document an absolute, invariable design suitable for PRINT. It was never meant to be how we consumed documents on a screen.❞
And I must add:
We the data professionals, we hate PDFs. They might look good and structured for your human eyes, but the data inside them is a mess, unstructured and not suitable to be processed by computer programs.
Although we still didn’t reached an agreement for ubiquitous formats, here are some better options:
- ePub (which is basically packaged HTML + CSS + images) for long text such as articles, T&Cs or contracts. ePub is usually associated with books but I hope it can be popularized for other used, given its versatility.
- YAML, JSON, XML including digital signatures as JWS, for structured data such as government issued documents.
- SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics, which is an XML application) for high quality graphics, including paged and interactive content, such as exported presentation slides.
- MPEG-4 for interactive sequence of images, including dynamic animations and SVG with JavaScript, for content such as slide shows. Although MPEG-4 is usually associated with video, it can do much more than that. Player support is extremely weak for these other possibilities though.
- SQLite for pure tabular and relational data. The SQLite engine is now ubiquitous, present in every browser and on every platform you can think of.
Great, I like your idea. Now if I only knew a way to output my LaTeX documents in something like ePub, that would be great! Especially for reading those documents on a small e-ink device. Do you have suggestions for processing the LaTeX file to produce ePub output? Or some other format you suggested? Thanks a lot, I have really been looking for a solution for a while.