What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?
Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.
The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.
Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.
Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.
What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?
Open Office? Libre Office?
Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.
The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.
Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.
PDF is still shit, despite being open. Even a “minimal” viewer like mupdf has to carry a 100MB library with it. Interpreting them is arcane knowledge.
Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.
Meanwhile, Commonmark… whoa, still 126 pages printed as pdf, with all edge cases. Though they do want to be well-specified.