Discussing PDF@30 Years Old - Computerphile
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 17 พ.ค. 2023
- Professor Brailsford helped Adobe with PDF. His group helped move publishing forwards by publishing a journal about publishing using the actual processes the journal described!
/ computerphile
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This video was filmed and edited by Sean Riley.
Computer Science at the University of Nottingham: bit.ly/nottscomputer
Computerphile is a sister project to Brady Haran's Numberphile. More at www.bradyharan.com
My favourite PDFs are those documents where somebody printed a file from Excel, scanned it to PDF, and then asks you to fill it in on the computer and send back as docx.
Perfect combination! It happens. Sometimes.
@@hello-iw9pd its not meant to be edited. not a lot at least. its more about publishing
@@hello-iw9pdlatex?
@@your-mom-irl SVG?
@@your-mom-irl It is useful as a form that someone can fill and print on pretty much any OS. Especially as you can save a version with fields already filled so you don't have to redo them every time you need to use it.
Always glad to see the Prof, he's like a nerdy David Attenborough ❤
Attenborough isn't nerdy? You saying Biology and Ecology aren't nerdy? 🤨
@@hernanefrain6085I suspect this is another case of geek vs nerd conflation/confusion 🤷♀️
Same here, glad to see the professor doing well and still contributing!
Brailsford is such a great guest on the channel. Incredible insight and storytelling every time he comes on!
ya. i could listen to him for hours 👍
He was an early genius and vanguard to the digitization of publishing
I use pdfs daily for work and I'm constantly amazed that, even with 30 years to work on it, Adobe can't reliably open and edit the file format they themselves developed without their pdf editor application frequently crashing
imo PDFs are like "final" documents ready to be printed, not something you are expected to edit
@@NutchapolSalLiterally false. Editing PDF is trivial.
@@NutchapolSal Fillable forms are often made in acrobat, and it frequently crashes with them, even before they’re exported.
@@halfsourlizard9319 It is. But content easily fall apart. Minor touch-ups? No issues. Extensive revision? Herding cats.
@@kimuyu Choose better software 🤷♀️
wow Prof. Brailsford is old, he remembers a time when corporations had shame xD ;-) 4:35
Professor Brailsford is my favorite Computerphile guest. He is an incredible educator and storyteller.
Always great to see the Professor speak passionately about PDF (Well anything he is passionate about really!). He mentioned redundancy and archiving briefly. PDF has become a de facto format for document preservation. There is now a PDF/A archival standard - and tools for validation. People print to PDF to save documents for the long haul. It would be interesting to get the professors opinion on this!
Nice to see Professor Brailsford back! Hope he is doing well and enjoing his well earned retirement
The thing that really pushed it over the finish line for me was print to PDF. Initially with PDF 'printers' you'd install, then finally built into everything.
Tried to explain this to a user recently as they were printing out then scanning back in :)
@@TheStevenWhiting 😂
I'm grateful Professor Brailsford's learning, experience and anecdotes are being mined and documented.
The turning point for me, after grudgingly using PostScript and then PDF in the nineties with sub-par Adobe tools was Apple's adoption of the PDF model for Mac OS X's Quartz graphics toolkit, rather than paying Adobe to continue NeXT's licensing of Display PostScript.
It was a fast, high-quality, clean, consistent renderer for PDF files and a nice clean, designed object model for the GUI, allowing future HiDPI (then Retina) resolution; hardware acceleration; colour management; font management and so on, rather than a stack of bitmap-based hacks.
Suddenly, creating and consuming PDFs became a breeze rather than a chore. After a few updates, Preview app was about 3 times faster than Acrobat, making pagination finally unobtrusive, and excellent parity between paper and screen.
Love this style of video; it feels so much like going round to my Dad's to talk to him about his work as a young man! I love it
It's always interesting to watch Professor Brailsford.
-.- 30 years and still PDFs are a PITA to work with, especially if you are tasked with making them accessible...
The original purpose of PDF was to represent a printed page in an accurate and consistent manner. Reflow was expressly /not/ desired. Nor did reading order matter: What was important was making sure every letter goes in the right place, not which order to read in. The accessibility features later bodged in with revisions to the format really go against the intention of PDF, which is why they are so awkward.
That's part of the problem with PDF now: It was made for one purpose, which it did very well, but it's since been extended and rewritten to be far broader in scope than the original design permitted.
Professor Brailsford is one of my favorites on computerphile.
More Professor Brailsford ! - a very warm welcome back, you've been away far too long
It is always great to see Professor Brailsford!
One thing I love about PDFs is that many old (and long out of print) tabletop game books are again available to purchase as downloadable PDF files and in some cases as print on demand books that look almost exactly like the ones that were originally published decades ago.
Love these stories about PDF❤
He is the best❤
A full documentary would be brilliant!
I looked at Heaviside's "Electrical Papers" recently, and I had to marvel at the quality of typesetting and the difficulty of getting the equations and formulae correct. PDF would have been a true marvel in 1900. Thanks for a good discussion on PDF.
I just love these looks back into computer history.
Excited to see this article about PDF at 30 years! Thanks for the shoutout at the end Dave! 12 years of ISO work on PDF and counting :)
Such a pleasure to see Professor Brailsford again in a video!
I remember when PDF arrived. I remember our first client wanting software documentation in PDF. I remember thinking, "This will never catch on." But then again, I never thought computer viruses and worms would really catch on, either.
PB, the man, the legend.
About 10 years ago, I got into PostScript (which is a fully-fledged programming language in its own right), and ended up writing programs to create the necessary PostScript to place text and draw graphics at arbitrary positions on an A4 page. Then, using GhostScript, I was able to produce a PDF.
And all done without touching proprietary software!
I would love to come and visit Professor Brailsford
Spectacular shirt as always.Thank you
Love Professor Brailsford!
When PDF came out I worked for Harlequin on their PostScript competitor, writing device drivers for the 1993 NT beta version to support postscript output on professional devices with higher resolution. We had to develop film in a darkroom to see the full resolution output for those devices. So there was certainly already higher resolution output, just not in domestic products.
"It was just a little machine, but it was ours and it was beautiful and we could play with it." That's a man who truly love with trade
Im using pdf's on a daily basis, I love this format, works everywhere, no malware, latex compiles to it, it can include pictures and can look like u want!
hahahahahaha
No malware? Uh
@@lainwired3946 yea, they cant contain malware, the pdf reader could have a vulnerability but that ur pdf reader has a vulnerability and the pdf is made for that exact pdf reader is very unlikely.
@@Timm2003 that goes for any file format under the sun tho
@@lainwired3946 docx? PE?
If malware developers have set a goal of creating a perfect malware injection tool they would have been hard pressed to create a better format than PDF for that goal.
I used to hate PDF when I was younger because I didn't understand how it works and what it's used for. But now that I am older and I understand it, it's one of my favorite technologies ever created
Great video of prof Brailsford!
Back in the day I worked for a company that did hardware and software for the printing industry. When we needed to generate well-behaved PostScript suitable for further processing our initial solution was to generate PDF then print the PDF to PostScript. Later on the entire workflow migrated to PDF, but I was long gone by then.
This was the same company where my favourite customer demo was the Towers of Hanoi in PostScript...
I think PDF (and PostScript) is an absolute triumph, all things considered. A PDF file renders on nearly every end user device, the output looks nice and there are plenty of tools for producing and editing them. It's been a great standard IMHO.
Everything you said is true, but it's a horrible file format to generate.
90% of PDFs these days contain massively over compressed renderings of the original source document images and vectors. Makes me sad every time I get one of those.
I knew of a company that had a required documentation sharing policy with a competitor (they were both part of the same standards committee). This company was far ahead of the competitor, so was the only one with anything to share. The documentation was beautiful with links everywhere. So, they printed it out, scanned it, and sent a pdf of the low quality scanned images, fulfilling their obligations of sharing with their competitor.
You can't compress vector images, as for bitmap images it's a tradeoff between quality and size, where size usually wins if you don't have lots of storage or need to share over the internet.
@@Deus_Almighty the owner of the document as pdf may have no say. Often middleware on servers get at corporate document stores with aggressive tools that re render the pdf to cut the file size down. This usually results in vector objects being rendered as very low quality bitmaps. Other reasons perhaps licensing of content as it is quite easy to rip stuff out of a pdf. Being of such poor as a bitmap the asset is useless elsewhere.
Bell Labs' importance is similar in much much bigger sense than when John Carmack and friends assured their higher ups that releasing the source code of their pioneer hit game for free was a good idea.
Thank you so much, you are a great source of education for many people. I hope you will be around for a long time with newly developing types of active health actions on your body's systems.
i alway like see Professor David Brailsford such i wealth of information and history its a shame hes not on more often these days
I love you computerphile
This video makes me think of the Farewell ETAOIN SHRDLU video. Definitely look it up!
I love sitting and listening to the Prof! Aural bliss 😊
What a nice gentleman, great episode.
Did you change the camera or something, the video looks great!
We can't live without PDF.
We really take text and printing for granted today. Once upon a time it was very complicated, limited, and expensive.
Today it’s so ubiquitous we don’t even think about it.
But the invention of typeset and printing was a literal revolution over the handwritten and illuminated texts before it. Shame they printed a bible with it. Imagine how different the world would be now if it had been a humanist text! Would never have happened of course.
Not from computer background - here by near chance - what a fine fine man!
This is really interesting, great video :D
My favorite feature is print to file where you can take pretty much anything from any format and 'print' it to a .pdf file
I hate the proprietary nature of it - most businesses use pdfs when what they really desire is an Open Document Format so that programmatic extraction or filtering of text and images is easily achieved. Few businesses require the content of their pdfs to be scaled up, they usually have other formats for such content such as the many CAD formats.
Learned a new word today: Digable-outable.
I'm glad PDF didn't die despite being an annoying virus vector at times like Flash was. PDF is much more useful than flash ever was. As far as I'm concerned PDF is something like Computer Microfilm - fillable form files aside.
@@Mr-hs9ju File signatures and form fillable files as I understand it. I know there were 11,000 updates to the Adobe PDF reader for security. I use Foxit PDF reader because maybe it's not as targeted.
Computerphile's David Attenborough.
I remember the precise moment I first encountered PDF at Egghead Software. I couldn’t, for the life of me, figure out what the point of it was.
We need to support SVG format. And I hope 3D will be added for SVG.
PDF (well as Adobe saw it) was actually supposed to be a multimedia rendering foremat, even today you can embed video, music, pictures etc natively in pdf files, hence part of the security problems. But, with just static page rendering considered you have to wonder what might have been made of HPGL as alternative.
Amazing video bro
thank you sir
Wow. Timely. I only just realised the fidelity thing in print. If only it hadn't de facto become the Adobe format.
Thanks for this. :)
I love the part where he explains that all of modern computing exists because antitrust laws used to be enforced
I have no idea what most of that meant. Loved the accent.
I once had to get the menu from a restaurant into their website. What they had was a PDF. The PDF only contained low resolution images of the menu. I had to manually put in like 180 menu item named descriptions and prices (of which there where 3, with no specific pricing pattern)
In the late 1990s pdfs used to open reliably and in a flash. Decades on with Moore's Law and... not so much.
It's reassuring seeing Professor Brailsford doing great! #legend😎
Problem is, to this day, you can open a PDF in 3 different browsers and have 3 different results.
I was recently sent a pdf with a 3d model in it. Not just a 3d model, it a fully interactive 3d model. I doubt it would open on my ebook reader.
I honestly haven't come across a PDF that look completely broken on Linux for at least a decade, if not two. At worse there's a half-pixel difference, or a lack of support for filling forms. But documents designed to be printed (not those interactive non-sens) work pretty well.
PDF has this problem *least* of all the document formats.
I still find pdf resistance. I think it's because people want to edit the source. But if you can get past that, pdf is the best "final document". It scales up in resolution practically infinitely, and allows you to grab a screenshot (or printout) of just a small part of a document to emphasize a point. I think pdf is more likely to "surf the decades" than products like Word. The very interesting stories my mother wrote in Word 30 years ago cannot be opened by modern computers. I have to extract the text and make a new file so family members can read now. I feel pdf has a much better chance of withstanding the decades.
Speaking of PDF, what's the advantage over PostScript?
From PDF to Word is still a struggle if anything fancy in the PDF. Even back in 2008 struggled with this at NHS as someone needed it. Its when I discovered how bad it was to do if there was any non standard formatting in the PDF.
Because you shouldn't be able to do that. Pdf is for printing or viewing, not for editing. A lot of pdf documents are not made in Word either, but LaTeX or other tools.
@@yds6268 BS. If I save a word file as PDF, there is no reason converting that same PDF to word results in total garbage.
@@codycastThis is like toasting a piece of bread then scraping off the outside and expecting it to go back to normal bread
~ 12:15 - It's sad how to this day people don't understand that PDF is primarily a _page description_ language, with only some, optional semantic markup. (As opposed to simple e-book formats, all some subset of (X)HTML.)
I've been playing with PDF lately, and there's two things that seem not possible within the standard: use metric, use medium scale. Very specific; Draw a 1cm×1cm box with an outline of the resolution of the printer (say 1/1200" or 1/600", depending on the printer).
Why does PostScript measure in points, when the standard paper sizes are defined in millimeters?
American engineers.
You can put things in PDF good luck retrieving them in a useful way without reading a GB of text.
7:30 Oh, the "paperless office" hoax! I started my work in IT in 1993 and it was soon all about it. Hahaha. Never happened, of course, because any true beaurocrat or accountant would rather eat her rubber-stamp then let you off without a signed chit, a counter-signed slip and a stamped certificate.
I love the computerfile IT gossip and stories!
I remember people in 1995 saying that by 2000, no-one would buy real computers anymore and we'd all be using thin clients connected to the cloud!
@@Recessioof course full computers now are thinner then any clients they had
@@Recessio It's a pet dream of IT corporations trotted out every decade or 2 and it never works. Google Stadia anyone?
The paperless office was never a fact... in fact since the laser printer, there is more paper printed now.
I think the pandemic and remote work changed that significantly. First because everyone was sitting somewhere where the printer (if they have one) isn't set up with their work computer. Then because they're not going to walk away from their regular screen when they're in a meeting. And finally because having the document digital means that you can show it to everyone else, rather than meaning that you can't show it to everyone else.
I was fairly young when I first encountered PDFs, but at the beginning I didn't quite understand how it was different from postscript.
I was 4 when PDF came out. Simpler times
If you take nothing else away, pdf stands for Portable Document Format
PDF is a revolutionary document format the invention benefit for Life normal
I have always wondered would could have been had Adobe mutated PDF to PHTML, with page contents placed with position:absolute. Portable forms would have been such a huge game changer for so many people. Adobe has even killed off XFA PDF forms and it makes me sad for there was just so much potential.
Nice👍
I still think that PS, as a concept, was much better, I could edit it w/o any head-ache....
Where do I get one of those shirts?
From his washing machine or wardrobe 😂
my brain be reading it as "pdf at 30 fps"
Is pdf a container, kinda like mkv for video?
Not quite, but you can think of it as a container of objects.
A very high crime is EDITING pdf files. They should always be read-only! If editing is needed, it should be done in the software that created the content in the first place and then re-rendered into a new pdf file.
That implies that you should never create forms in PDF format that should be filled out.
Unfortunately the reality is that PDF is the primary format for making forms available to fill them out.
MS Word .docx isn't fully supported by free or open-source software (you often have layout issues) and ODF hasn't caught on.
@@FunctionGermany Okay, yes, granted. Forms and e-signatures do indeed edit a "user area" of a pdf file. It does not alter the actual published document. The data is stored in a header or footer of the pdf file, similar to a cookie in a web browser. Forms came in later revs of pdf, I believe.
No, the fact that you can't edit them is the crime
@@Archimedes.5000 Well pdf is meant to be published works in electronic form. You're the consumer of that content. Think of pdf being like a book, newspaper, magazine, etc. You read those publications, you don't use a pen and write in them. (Yes, you literally can, but you can't change what has already been published.)
@@aaron74doesn't matter, if it's a hypertext format then it should be editable.
Nothing stops you from printing it to paper/image where it can't be edited by text editors, but it should be editable before printing.
I get the feeling I’m not using PDFs to their full potential. I just see them as read-only versions of files that you release final versions of docs in.
PDF files are, by nature, very hard to edit. It can be done, but not easily and very hard to automate. This is why trying to convert from PDF to another format usually results in a garbled mess.
Each page of a PDF is, in essence, a script. The output of this script is the page. You can't just conveniently find instructions for 'text goes here' because where 'here' is depends on the state established by the program that has previously executed.
Were Postscript and PDF competing, or do they do something different? If they were competitors, why did PDF win?
PDF is based on Postscript, but is simplified to eliminate general-purpose programming features that made Postscript complicated to work with.
Oh, and PostScript had to be licenced from Adobe, while PDF was open. There were PostScript clones (eg. Microsoft's "TrueImage", from where "TrueType" fonts came) but until recently they were pretty poor.
It was a fair trade, to be honest. PostScript was a full programming language -- heck, people have written raytracers in PostScript -- powerful enough for industrial printing, and worth real money; while PDF was a dumb version of the PostScript graphics model that couldn't actually _do_ anything, but would replicate the same end result. For most purposes, the licence-fee-free PDF was nearly all that people needed.
PDFs are Postscript with features/hints (metadata) to allow more efficient display generation.
PDF is based upon postscript, but it addressed a number of practical issues. Most importantly, PDF is /portable./ That's what the P stands for: One file, one document. Postscript documents can be postscript file per page plus a bunch of supporting fonts and resources in different formats which may or may not be supported by your co-worker's computer and printer, creating a compatibility nightmare. Postscript was great when it worked, but getting it working was the bane of the publishing industry. PDF solved that.
Each page in a PDF document is defined in a language that is a greatly simplified version of postscript. Really greatly simplified.
The comic sans of file formats
I avoid paper like the plague. I have large Pathology Lab customers that will not accept any form of paper service report and instrument vendors that only provide me with 3 copy report forms.
I have scanned the form and fill the scanned copy with software apps - I only use the form book to determine what the next form serial number is.
7:50 paper lasts about 150 years i think. i wonder how long harddrives last xD
Paper can last much longer than that. It depends on the acidity and overall qualitiy of the paper and of course on the climate conditions of the storage room. The oldest known paper document, the so called Missal of Silos, dates back almost a millenium to 1080.
@@andreasklindt7144 👍👍
My life would not be the same without PDF. It's an amazing publishing tool.
It strikes me that pdf was created to solve a technical issue faced by professionals rather than to become a defacto standard document interchange format among end users. Though perhaps this was always the intent. But I still am amused how often people send me .docx or some such. What can I do with that? Send a pdf please. Presentations excepted. Exporting presentation to pdf can be tricky. But when it works, pdf is great for that too.
I can’t edit a pdf. You need to do this in Word.
Huh, I just spent the day making a pdf from html in django with pdfkit. Bloody horrible format to work with.
Meanwhile, nuclear fusion is still 30 years in the future 😊
For goodness sake *KEEP THE CAMERA STILL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!*
I watch these videos wondering why we are being told about things as though they were of days long gone, but to me they are recent events. That's a problem as you age and all your future is in the past.