Comic Discussion > QUESTIONABLE CONTENT
WCDT strips 4301-4305 (6th July to 10 July 2020)
Tova:
Don't quote me on this, but I think (read: guess) the reason the word 'portable' is in the name is that fonts, images and other assets are packaged up in the same file as the postscript referencing them, as opposed to standalone postscript which references them externally.
Thrudd:
My observation is that the latest iteration and how most people use the format is to maintain the documents formatting between systems so that it will always look the same no matter the system it is displayed on. Now compression / file size depends on how efficient the algorithms are on stripping out unnecessary support data like unused characters in True Type font files and reduce the resolution of images.
It was a notorious issue with early text documents where spacing and font sets would vary from system to system and it only got worse when M$ got involved where one version release would radically change the layout of a document produced on a different version release. :psyduck:
notStanley:
While maintaining format when that embeds some of the contents meaning, I get annoyed at documents that are just paragraphs of plain text, yet the author is so enamored of their precious babies that they locked out re-flow, forcing me to scroll across as well as down to read the dang thing! Survivable when at my desk and can just make that window bigger, but a WTF moment on portable devices with small screens.
cybersmurf:
IIRC PDF supports font embedding as a whole, and for the characters only. PDF, as a technically read only format, with being able to use basically anything but not having to turn it into a picture is a good idea. Problem: although now an ISO standard, it was developed as a proprietary thing. While that can be good in the way of being able to move on faster with decisions on how to do so, it was developed as a part of a software suite, with making money as a priority, not usability.
Tova:
I would counter that making money and usability are not necessarily in conflict. The two aims simply need to be aligned. I would daresay that with PDFs, they are. It is probably PDF's only feature that matters.
Usability can be just as much of a problem with free software (free as in whichever you like) as it is with proprietary software. As I mentioned elsewhere, open software generally is at its best when developers eat their own dog food (e.g. git, linux). That's a more powerful metric than whether making money was a priority.
Here's a detail. Making money is still a priority. The people who comprise the ISO working group generally come from industry - companies whose goal is to make a profit.
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