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.
Pretty much. PDF was specifically designed to retain the same look across any device. The goal was that if you designed a document to look a certain way, that opening it on another device wouldn’t fuck your entire design. That’s also why editing PDFs is so damned frustrating, because they’re designed to not change. It largely started as a frustration with the “move an image 3 pixels to the left, and now all your text is in the wrong place” issue. But the EEE strategy by Microsoft directly contributed to pdf becoming the de facto way to share documents.
My Dad got frustrated with docs as people saw that as an invitation to edit the document, or cut and paste stuff he would write. So he switched to using PDF whenever other people got involved.
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 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.
They were really designed to show the same output on the screen and printer.
Even if you are using the same word processor software and file format, a document can look vastly different when you send it to someone else who doesn't have the same screen resolution or the same fonts installed.
PDF started as just a print preview for the postscript printer language. They should have just stopped there instead of trying to make it do all sorts of other shit that can open security holes.
The constant parade of file formats drove popularity, but it was really about being the only popular format to look the same.
Maybe with more advertising? Most people don't know about the Open Document Format and that it's standardization sent MS to panicky rework their .doc & co. to pseudo-open OOXML (.docx etc.).
When you save an odt from Word and open it in OpenOffice, the formatting is usually all fucked. At least that used to be the case. A pdf comes out right on the other side.
I have a great idea for a program! I should describe it in agonizing detail to an AI owned by some company so it will spit out working source code. Nothing can go wrong with my plan!
I mean, they can still steal your idea, fork it, repackage it and charge for it while refusing to upstream their development. But now it's a licensing discussion and not a personal attack.
This is a flawless plan, especially since they pinky swore that they wouldn't keep around the information you put into the black box AI. So we're all safe!