Text formats should be readable forever. PDF, while generally excellent in this regard, has already broken backwards-comparability on several occasions (or rather: Acrobat has, which is not formally the same as the format doing so, but in practice there isn’t a whole lot of difference; you might as well just read the raw xml in an “unopenable” keynote document).
Adobe’s marketing will tell you otherwise, of course. I used to share an office at Berkeley with Paulo Ney de Souza, who had a wonderful collection of “legacy” pdf files that could no longer be opened in Acrobat that he would trot out for the Adobe sales people when they came by (he was helping to get MSP off the ground at that point).
PDF is probably the best choice for preserving “design”, but I wouldn’t trust it for preserving content any more than any other format. Always keep a plain text copy.
> PDF is probably the best choice for preserving “design”, but I wouldn’t trust it for preserving content any more than any other format. Always keep a plain text copy.
Open spec doesn't help unless all the creation tools adhere strictly to the specification. Historically, they haven't, and support for their various "quirks" has been uneven at best.
I agree, the same argument could probably have been made of postscript (ps) at some point in time and while it's still around, most (non-technical) people don't use it.
Adobe’s marketing will tell you otherwise, of course. I used to share an office at Berkeley with Paulo Ney de Souza, who had a wonderful collection of “legacy” pdf files that could no longer be opened in Acrobat that he would trot out for the Adobe sales people when they came by (he was helping to get MSP off the ground at that point).
PDF is probably the best choice for preserving “design”, but I wouldn’t trust it for preserving content any more than any other format. Always keep a plain text copy.