I'd rather bet on something you can implement all by yourself without needing to wade through a thousand page spec. How about plain uncompressed text and netp[bgp]m for images?
Yeah, that's the one that always bitched and moaned about not being able to display the document correctly. I got tired of it and disabled the thing.
I've used other PDF viewers (Evince, xpdf, gs, mupdf), and tell you what.. I've come across PDFs they cannot display properly.
If I have to rely on others implementing things for me, and there is concrete evidence that others have trouble doing it, why would I rely on such a format?
"Patches welcome" is an aggressive, user-hostile, anti-social response to being told that the thing you suggested does not work. It's telling the user to fuck off because your own suggestion was flawed. clarry didn't run to HN and scream "pdf.js sucks!".
"I'd rather bet on something you can implement all by yourself without needing to wade through a thousand page spec."
pdf.js was obviously outside the bounds of what he said he wanted from the beginning. You stubbornly brought it up anyway, then gave a nasty, clichéd response when he pointed out exactly why it was the wrong answer.
"If it doesn't work for you, fix it" is ridiculous. It's saying "here's this thing that doesn't do what you want, go make it do what you want instead of using these other things that already do what you want".
I think you're reading too much into that, or have a chip on your shoulder, or both. "Patches welcome" is an invitation, a smiling, friendly, we-think-you're-good-enough-and-want-your-help, open-handed gesture that is meant to encourage cooperation and evoke the deeply human drive to help others.
nknighthb is completely right. It is user hostile. It even makes a huge assumption, that clarry is programmer in the first place. With "Patches welcome" you might as well be saying "If you don't like it, spend a year learning [Language] to fix this issue." How is that anything other than user hostile?
If my mom can't open a pdf in pdf.js, I'm not going to tell her "Well mom, patches welcome."
Give that clarry is a) posting on HN and b) apparently at least contemplating writing his/her own OS at some point, the assumption that he/she is a programmer is anything but "huge".
But I try not to depend on too many things and people, if there's a way around it. I like to have control. That's freedom to me, and freedom gives me peace of mind.
So, no, I don't see why I should waste my precious free time improving software support for a format that I find way overcomplicated and just plain silly. Why should I?
Hmm, I've almost never had issues with PDFjs, and the handful of times it's been a problem Evince has worked fine. It is the default PDF viewer in Firefox now so I assume it works well enough for them to do that. I think the PDFs that can't be opened correctly may be blamed on the creation tool screwing up rather than the reader. Though I guess I don't know if those handful of PDFs were up to spec or not.
This bugs me a lot. If the spec is known how it is possible for some random reader to not being able to display it. Is pdf now somewhat html in late 90's where it was browser specified rather than specification?
There's no formatting info in those. Why not just include a statically linked copy of xpdf? The x86 family will be around for a while, and if it goes away I'm sure there will be emulators.
What do you do when xpdf doesn't display the pdf correctly?
What system does that statically linked thing run on? Is that system going to remain compatible for decades? Or emulators capable of running an old version of it?
Why overcomplicate matters when you can pick something you know just works.
Because I care about formatting? Anyway, documents I haven't touched decades and decades from now, I probably won't care about.
I'm just not especially concerned. It's not like I get better life out of my paper documents, as I don't worry about the whole acid-free paper in an hermetic container deal.
