Is there a better high fidelity, printing friendly format with viewers available for all major platforms out there?
PDF has a lot of flaws, but what’s the alternative here? Word .DOC files are proprietary, RTF files are too limited, and HTML allows for too much variation between browsers and looks like garbage when printed.
it really isn't. Depending on what you display your text with the results may look very different depending on the platform. 'Portable' is in the name for a reason, the big advantage of pdfs is that they'll look the same everywhere.
Look, I'm laughing so hard, I suddenly turned Spanish*. Lol.
That wasn't true in the late 80s and 90s, and it isn't true today. The reasons are different, and PDF does allow a lot of control, PLUS, PDFs undoubtedly DO look "the same everywhere" to the degree of "fidelity" you're implicitly assuming (and, to be fair, the degree that is most important in this kind of casual discussion), but, my experiences with PDF and "same everywhere" (including across types of media) lead to uproarious laughter on the outside (and crying and gnashing of the teeth on the inside *<:o) ).
* j is so close to h in qwerty, mashing the keys = suddenly Spanish (where jajaja is often used / sensible with "soft j")
> But it's pretty simple to print just text pretty nicely from a website.
That hasn't been my experience at all. I've had to resort to taking screenshots or copying and pasting text from websites into Word to print something actually readable.
I do not know what browser you are using, but both Chrome and Firefox are extremely bad at printing.
Using the "reader mode" to print "just text" works on some sites, but on other sites it loses essential information from the original page or formats the text in such an inappropriate way that it becomes very hard to read. The "reader mode" is intended to be read loudly and not as an aid for printing.
What is needed is a print command that renders the page exactly like on the display, instead of rendering it for printing in such a way that much of the text becomes obscured by various junk.
It’s not double work, it’s the proper amount of work to do the task you (should) want to do: share information in an accessible way. Also, there are a billion different ways you can create decent HTML and a PDF from one source.
They're saying that because browsers render the HTML/CSS differently, the prints wouldn't look good. I don't think this is necessarily true, but even if it is, CSS lets you style the print version of a page directly so that the print looks good, and you can even make it look like a normal document and not a printed web page
PDFs allow for easy and portable saving, sharing, and generally also searching, all in a single file that will always have a consistent presentation.
Reasons not to use HTML
- HTML files generally have load of external calls to css and javascript that don't allow for making clean single files as is.
- Reality has proven that webdev will not to put effort into making saving pages cleanly viable. Expecting otherwise is fragile thinking
- Even if you go above and beyond the standard user and use a browser addon for saving webpages as a single file, this doesn't always work out as formatting generally becomes fucked in some way, sometimes severely.
- Often straight up a mandated requirement.
- HMTL links will always rot, but a government document faxed, photocopied, faxed again, and scanned into a PDF file spread haphazardly across a dozen university and legal archives is forever
Summarizing the results of some government project is a perfect use case for PDFs.
Or just use PDF where it will look nearly identical everywhere, even in print.
Not everybody has time to test multiple browsers to make sure content actually looks good across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, plus their mobile counterparts. Oh, and make a nice looking PDF on top of that.
PDF is perfectly fine for distributing a paper. In fact, I’d say it is the preferred means for most people.
I'm on Linux (NixOS) and have zero trouble viewing PDF's. And coming from a former Mac user (for whom the PDF format was practically native to the OS), that says a LOT. "Evince" is Gnome's document/PDF viewer. It's a fine format that is broadly usable. I hit Spacebar, the PDF "quicklooks" (just like on macOS!) thanks to Gnome Sushi, it's great.
Here, if you're a Linux guy, here's a bash function to view sexed-up man pages as PDF's (requires evince):
Over the decades, we've gone from non-web typesetting like troff/nroff/groff-t, TeX to first-gen DTP like InterLeaf to often-deceptively-marketed XSL toolchains [0] to vendors like Prince.
Somewhere in there, W3C created Paged Media Module Technical Group for CSS3, which would - someday!! - integrate CSS @media calls to support true typesetting and layout . . just from the web! Wow!
Oh wait . . that was around 2004.
So, since the PMM TG has been, I don't know, making paperclip men for two decades[1], others have taken that bull by the horns and implemented their own web print systems. Or selling them, for . . for a LOT of money; Prince is basically a closed-source CSS PMM implementation.
Disclaimer: I use Asciidoc for everything, so asciidoctor-web-pdf comes to mind. It's built on Paged.JS/Puppeteer (https://pagedjs.org), so issues might lag because of the Puppeteer dependency. On the plus side, it's integrated into Antora (https://antora.org/), so, hey, hello git-based pdf scheduler. How ya doin?
Back in the day, FlyingSaucer was the tech for web print; I've seen and wrenched it in a dozen different S1000D stacks. Its current incarnation is the ubiquitous openhtmltopdf and its descendants, it still has huge adoption in the Android ecosystem.
ReLaXed is the father of all JS web print implementations, but it's been dormant for awhile. I wouldn't use it directly. Besides, most of it lives on in Paged.js and others.
Vivliostyle is another great implementation on JS , based on the Chromium renderer rather than riding hard on Puppeteer. It's also got a really great widget that allows you to mark up HTML pages for reviews. Very neat.
Sorry, WeasyPrint. You're rad, but you're on Python, and none of my customers have been cool with that. If Python is cleared for your environment though, check it out. The svg handling is tight.
[0] I'll talk about that later. Let's not go into the afternoon angry.
[1] OK OK, I get it: the user base for web-pdf is always tiny in comparison to web frameworks. Most of the rest of the world has moved on from complex print, and, I mean, seriously, why not? HTML + JS + CSS does anything, and without Acrobat, and with control over load, AND without conditionals for print focused stuff, like trimming SVGs, or color profiles, or a million other things. AND AND AND. BUT. Aerospace, though, we're a print-focused business, we need the dead tree simulator. And so I've been riding this stupid donkey for twenty years now.
"Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting."
It was intended to be complaining about the security hazards of PDF (especially considering the topic), not preferring any particular format - the other commenters just got lost in the weeds.
Are shills misinformation adjacent in some way? It's interesting to see activists listed as potential shills, though they don't clearly explain the body of evidence that aligns activists as potentially harmful. An activist can be a shill but I'm not sold that they're all bad, but I've definitely run into a good number of activists who border so far on not knowing what they're talking about or how to talk about it that they're essentially harmful to either information quality or discourse among regular people.
Shills are absolutely misinformation because they distort the weighting.
If I am one guy and I complain about the font used in the question mark under the help menu, I am just one guy. If I spawn or buy or suborn a thousand accounts to complain about it, my message is amplified and can distort priorities, pass thresholds, and so forth. Shills can downvote something out of being seen at all, even on here unless you turn on "showdead." It's basically the commodification of a Sybil attack.
It is funded by the US Government. The only shills it will find are Russian, maybe the Chinese these days, the politically unpopular, and social media marketers.
Not sure about the title of this submission. The construction is ambiguous. The shills identified here were not funded by the DoD. They seem to have probably been funded by political campaigns. This study was funded by the DoD.
Tried to fit it all, maybe "DoD Report:" would have been better? On another note, would be great to see the amount of money that flows from our gov into such programs.
The site guidelines ask you to "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize."
If the study was DoD funded, that's a great piece of information to share—but please do so via a comment in the thread. Title fields are not supposed to be for sharing the details that the submitter considers important. (Other social news sites work that way, but HN intentionally doesn't.)
Were there any other actions taken to moderate this post beyond the title change? Genuinely curious, momentum halted and post fell to page 4 shortly after.
It got all the actions: first a moderator downweighted it (so that it would be lower on the front page, but not off it), then it set off the flamewar detector, and it also got flagged by users. I've rolled back most of that now.
> After reading all of the 1,000 replies by the user, the human then made
the assignment based on the following criteria: (1) “Did the user’s replies entirely, or almost entirely support one candidate?”; (2) “Did the user’s posts generally contain claims to support their arguments?”; and (3) “Did the user explicitly mention a tie to any campaign?”
If they can't see why these criteria are nonsensical then their entire premise should be discarded.
I don't conduct surveys or other research so it's not immediately obvious to me. I would guess that it's some combination of:
1) Humans making subjective calls like "generally contain claims to support" (and even just the subjectivity of the word "support");
2) Most opinionated users (read: people who reply 1,000 times) on social media are going to "entirely, or almost entirely support one candidate";
3) Most people are going to post things which "generally contain claims to support their arguments".
But I'm not really sure if those are (to a researcher who ought to know) the obvious problems with these criteria. Is there another problem that is seen which is not listed here? (Are these suggested "problems" even problems in this case?)
All correct. Added: you cannot establish 'ground truth' by a subjective analysis and then base your entire premise on its accuracy. They are the DOJ -- they could have found out who these people actually were if they wanted to. It isn't that hard to dox people on reddit.
See also most analysis of "Russian" "trolls", etc - basically, any individual or "organization" that's not "down with the program", for which accurate information is not available, so it is hallucinated into existence.
I found that trick a while back when trying to write a bookmarklet for downloading videos from reddit. I got it to work, but it downloads a version without audio... Since this is often superior, I stopped work and declared victory.
49 comments
[ 3.6 ms ] story [ 105 ms ] threadPDF has a lot of flaws, but what’s the alternative here? Word .DOC files are proprietary, RTF files are too limited, and HTML allows for too much variation between browsers and looks like garbage when printed.
Yeah, nowadays. But it's pretty simple to print just text pretty nicely from a website.
it really isn't. Depending on what you display your text with the results may look very different depending on the platform. 'Portable' is in the name for a reason, the big advantage of pdfs is that they'll look the same everywhere.
Hahahahhahhahahhahhahahahha ahhahahhaha ... ajajjjajjajaja...
Look, I'm laughing so hard, I suddenly turned Spanish*. Lol.
That wasn't true in the late 80s and 90s, and it isn't true today. The reasons are different, and PDF does allow a lot of control, PLUS, PDFs undoubtedly DO look "the same everywhere" to the degree of "fidelity" you're implicitly assuming (and, to be fair, the degree that is most important in this kind of casual discussion), but, my experiences with PDF and "same everywhere" (including across types of media) lead to uproarious laughter on the outside (and crying and gnashing of the teeth on the inside *<:o) ).
* j is so close to h in qwerty, mashing the keys = suddenly Spanish (where jajaja is often used / sensible with "soft j")
(No, they will not.)
That hasn't been my experience at all. I've had to resort to taking screenshots or copying and pasting text from websites into Word to print something actually readable.
Using the "reader mode" to print "just text" works on some sites, but on other sites it loses essential information from the original page or formats the text in such an inappropriate way that it becomes very hard to read. The "reader mode" is intended to be read loudly and not as an aid for printing.
What is needed is a print command that renders the page exactly like on the display, instead of rendering it for printing in such a way that much of the text becomes obscured by various junk.
Reasons not to use HTML
- HTML files generally have load of external calls to css and javascript that don't allow for making clean single files as is.
- Reality has proven that webdev will not to put effort into making saving pages cleanly viable. Expecting otherwise is fragile thinking
- Even if you go above and beyond the standard user and use a browser addon for saving webpages as a single file, this doesn't always work out as formatting generally becomes fucked in some way, sometimes severely.
- Often straight up a mandated requirement.
- HMTL links will always rot, but a government document faxed, photocopied, faxed again, and scanned into a PDF file spread haphazardly across a dozen university and legal archives is forever
Summarizing the results of some government project is a perfect use case for PDFs.
Disagree.
Serve it how you want the user to see it, but don't stop the user from choosing their own formats for comfort or accessibility afterward.
Not everybody has time to test multiple browsers to make sure content actually looks good across Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Edge, plus their mobile counterparts. Oh, and make a nice looking PDF on top of that.
PDF is perfectly fine for distributing a paper. In fact, I’d say it is the preferred means for most people.
Here, if you're a Linux guy, here's a bash function to view sexed-up man pages as PDF's (requires evince):
Over the decades, we've gone from non-web typesetting like troff/nroff/groff-t, TeX to first-gen DTP like InterLeaf to often-deceptively-marketed XSL toolchains [0] to vendors like Prince.
Somewhere in there, W3C created Paged Media Module Technical Group for CSS3, which would - someday!! - integrate CSS @media calls to support true typesetting and layout . . just from the web! Wow!
Oh wait . . that was around 2004.
So, since the PMM TG has been, I don't know, making paperclip men for two decades[1], others have taken that bull by the horns and implemented their own web print systems. Or selling them, for . . for a LOT of money; Prince is basically a closed-source CSS PMM implementation.
Disclaimer: I use Asciidoc for everything, so asciidoctor-web-pdf comes to mind. It's built on Paged.JS/Puppeteer (https://pagedjs.org), so issues might lag because of the Puppeteer dependency. On the plus side, it's integrated into Antora (https://antora.org/), so, hey, hello git-based pdf scheduler. How ya doin?
Back in the day, FlyingSaucer was the tech for web print; I've seen and wrenched it in a dozen different S1000D stacks. Its current incarnation is the ubiquitous openhtmltopdf and its descendants, it still has huge adoption in the Android ecosystem.
ReLaXed is the father of all JS web print implementations, but it's been dormant for awhile. I wouldn't use it directly. Besides, most of it lives on in Paged.js and others.
Vivliostyle is another great implementation on JS , based on the Chromium renderer rather than riding hard on Puppeteer. It's also got a really great widget that allows you to mark up HTML pages for reviews. Very neat.
Sorry, WeasyPrint. You're rad, but you're on Python, and none of my customers have been cool with that. If Python is cleared for your environment though, check it out. The svg handling is tight.
[0] I'll talk about that later. Let's not go into the afternoon angry.
[1] OK OK, I get it: the user base for web-pdf is always tiny in comparison to web frameworks. Most of the rest of the world has moved on from complex print, and, I mean, seriously, why not? HTML + JS + CSS does anything, and without Acrobat, and with control over load, AND without conditionals for print focused stuff, like trimming SVGs, or color profiles, or a million other things. AND AND AND. BUT. Aerospace, though, we're a print-focused business, we need the dead tree simulator. And so I've been riding this stupid donkey for twenty years now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
https://cryptome.org/2012/07/gent-forum-spies.htm
The Gentleperson's Guide To Forum Spies
I don't think they posted anything political, they were similar to /u/GallowBoob where they were good at making the front page.
If I am one guy and I complain about the font used in the question mark under the help menu, I am just one guy. If I spawn or buy or suborn a thousand accounts to complain about it, my message is amplified and can distort priorities, pass thresholds, and so forth. Shills can downvote something out of being seen at all, even on here unless you turn on "showdead." It's basically the commodification of a Sybil attack.
If the study was DoD funded, that's a great piece of information to share—but please do so via a comment in the thread. Title fields are not supposed to be for sharing the details that the submitter considers important. (Other social news sites work that way, but HN intentionally doesn't.)
Past explanations here in case helpful: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
If they can't see why these criteria are nonsensical then their entire premise should be discarded.
I don't conduct surveys or other research so it's not immediately obvious to me. I would guess that it's some combination of:
1) Humans making subjective calls like "generally contain claims to support" (and even just the subjectivity of the word "support");
2) Most opinionated users (read: people who reply 1,000 times) on social media are going to "entirely, or almost entirely support one candidate";
3) Most people are going to post things which "generally contain claims to support their arguments".
But I'm not really sure if those are (to a researcher who ought to know) the obvious problems with these criteria. Is there another problem that is seen which is not listed here? (Are these suggested "problems" even problems in this case?)
Sure enough I tried it and it works: https://old.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/.json
TIL. I wonder if that's going away given the recent Reddit API access shenanigans.
Try making a bookmark whose url is this:
Then go to any reddit page where the main post is a video file, and click the bookmark!There's this implicit assumption that a) ML could effectively spot bad actors, and b) this is a fight someone, somewhere is able to win.
I feel the information environment has degraded so badly over the last decade that this feels naive.