Title text: The heartfelt tune it plays is CC licensed, and you can get it from my seed on JoinDiaspora.net whenever that project gets going.
Transcript
2003:
[Cueball approaches a bearded fellow.]
Cueball: Did you get my essay?
Bearded Fellow: Yeah, it was good! But it was a .doc; You should really use a more open-
Cueball: Give it a rest already. Maybe we just want to live our lives and use software that works, not get wrapped up in your stupid nerd turf wars.
Bearded Fellow: I just want people to care about the infrastructures we’re building and who-
Cueball: No, you just want to feel smugly superior. You have no sense of perspective and are probably autistic.
2010:
Cueball: Oh my God! We handed control of our social world to Facebook and they’re DOING EVIL STUFF!
Bearded Fellow: Do you see this?
[Inset, the bearded fellow rubs his index and middle fingers against his thumb.]
Bearded Fellow: It’s the world’s tiniest open-source violin.
Well, that and every time you touch a DOC/DOCX file it reformats itself to your local settings, fucking up the entire layout. PDF is a terrible, inefficient, poorly (or at least variably) implemented format which was proprietary for two decades but is now about the best option we have for a document to look the same at the recipient end as the sender and still include text, vector, bitmapped, semi-interactive, and certifiable/traceable contents.
I really, really hate that so many people still try to share ebooks as PDFs. Why that was ever a thing makes no sense to me. Yes, I absolutely wish to read a 500 page novel on portrait letter size pages with tiny font that completely ignores my screen size.
I’ve given up on trying to find certain books in sane formats. Thankfully Calibre is really good at converting PDFs to actual ebook formats.
There’s a bit of a learning curve, and sometimes I have to do a little semi-automated cleanup – but it works.
Really? I must have had a particularly troublesome PDF. It was almost like running it through OCR, generating hundreds of weird typos and formatting errors when I tried to convert with calibre.
The OCR struggles with some PDFs for whatever reasons: font, formatting, etc.
There are 3rd party PDF OCR websites/programs that work better. If I’m having issues I run it through one of those first.
Any suggestions? Even the good ones had error rates that might not matter for a couple of pages, but when scaled to a 500 page book, even a 1% error rate results in an annoying level of typos.
I use gImageReader + Tesseract, but that probably doesn’t meet your criteria. Unfortunately OCR is very rarely perfect unless the input is perfectly clear and with a “OCR friendly” font/formatting. There are “AI powered” OCR out there, but I can’t speak to how well they work and I don’t know of any free ones.
What are more efficiente and better implemented formats for documents sharing?
Djvu, but it’s toolset is proprietary.
Markdown is gaining traction. There’s lots of tools that will edit and display Markdown consistently, and without a dedicated tool, it’s just a very readable text file.
And, most importantly for today, it’s easy to generate a PDF file from, haha.
I don’t get why it always must look the same. If i look at Markdown or Asciidoc/tor, Restext, you get content and formatting. Pack it in a tar.gz and create a directory structure for pages and media, etc. and it would imho suffice. And i would gladly see document X in my prefered font size and family instead of creators favorite.
I mean, i get it for typesetting etc. But not for common use.
Yes, let’s allow the end user to apply their custom font to their tax documents and employee contracts
What i say is, why save something like font family in the document.
What are you all so stiff on legal documents? Depends maybe on your juristiction, but my (swiss) employee contract was e-mailed to me as a scan. I put a scan of my sign in and sent it back, informed my employee and that was fine. Sure, a certificate to sign would be more practical, but we are not there yet.
Change it back if you don’t like it? If everyone gets to set the fonts locally then everyone gets to use their favourite.
Markdown is a bit limited (the spec doesn’t cover common extensions like tables of contents, internal links, and explicit page breaks). AsciiDoc is better on that issue.
The only use case I have for being picky about the formatting/layout of a document is my resume. Some people have a threshold for how long a resume is allowed to be (for example 1 additional page per 10 years of experience). Also, I have all of the dates right justified (for easy skimming) but still on the same line as the job title (to save space on the page).