Well it was just a bunch of chaps with ideas back then

Ikr!

I've just checked how long the section about the immigration person actually lasts on this video. It's about 4 mins. My guess is that it took about half that time for me to explain it on the actual day. But yes I really did explain about Word/Newspapers/AutoCAD in roughly that order. Fortunately it was a relatively "quiet" day in Immigration by SFO standards :-)

ProfDaveB Haha, cool man! :)

ProfDaveB Cheers, Professor. :)

+ProfDaveB I just want to thank you for all the anecdotes you've shared here on over the years. Awesome and interesting stuff all 'round. :D Greetings from Denmark.

Agreed - I love his style - I could listen to him all day talking about his experiences in the industry.

He held my attention for sure and I could just listen to him for hours I think.

True.

Agreed. I find Adobe's reader so clunky and obnoxious.

Official pdf reader is way too big , even without that darn antivirus installer.

if you are sure you only need to view the PDF and not something else such as advanced printing options or Form-Filling features, you can uninstall the adobe reader and uses more lightweight replacement such as SumatraPDF

Agree. I am using Chrome as default PDF reader.

But its the best for touchpad and touchscreen before Edge came in

Sumatra PDF ftw! :D

lol I just use chrome to read PDFs, much faster and does everything you really need.

Even on a Windows machine i usualy install Evince from the GNOME Project. Works and i need the GTK anyway for Gimp.

can't mark up PDFs in chrome

@@PENDANTturnips i just recently started to trial WPS PDF reader, it is quite nice in fact, it still needs some polishing but some functions like eye protection are much appreciated for us night readers.

Lol, yea this is exactly how it goes for me . Don't want people in line glaring at me .

what's a vulnerability distribution?

what do you mean with streamlined vulnerability distribution? do you mean that the pdf reader installer was loaded with malware?

oh i thought of it the wrong way lol, yea its the biggest security loophole out there.

they had plenty of competion from Flash, so they had to buy macromedia. ;)

Well, to be fair, they did leave Java for Oracle to but up instead of buying Sun themselves. Monopolies and Mergers and all that :D

But being bundled with malware worked so well for java...

Still does.

the rise of better and also free pdf readers probably helped them a lot.

That, and the widespread ability to export it from third party software like OpenOffice without much hassle. Which does, alas, make it very hard for Adobe to get any money for it...

But if it was free, how did sales out perform Photoshop?

You could do the same thing with a web page form + Javascript...

​@@encycl07pedia- and it's _much_ easier to fill out, read, and process submissions, as well as to edit the form should you need extra requirements.

Praise PDF.js

PDF's could be exploited to run code, as well as execute completely unrestricted javascript. I think those exploits are all but gone these days, but vulnerable installers are still found on many driver cd's, and people still to this day fall victim.

Don't most browsers integrate a PDF reader these days? I'm a bit sheltered - I use a Mac, so PDF is written into its OS as its underlying graphics model, so it handles PDF as a native type (indeed it uses it for internal representation of any graphic content, even for things like cut-and-paste). So 'Acrobat' simply isn't a thing on the Mac (it exists, but I'm not sure what it does that you can't do with the OS anyway). Writing a PDF reader on the Mac takes just a few lines of code. But I assume that Windows handles it reasonably well also, otherwise it would never have taken off.

@@GRAHAMAUS Firefox uses PDF.js, which converts PDF to HTML, so you can even inspect elements within the document.

Oh wow, I had forgotten RealPlayer.

+Penny Lane Adobe After Effects sends its regards....

This is *high quality* bad justification.

***** Then I think I'd prefer the Lannisters.

***** How would you convince someone of such nonsense?

Penny Lane Honestly, I believe that it is part of the national standards for written works where I live. Teachers want to see full justification even if of bad quality over any well done left justification. And then students grow with the idea that left justification is bad. Idk, Is left justification regarded as bad? I'm afraid you will tell me that left justification is worst, but I'm unsure if that's my indoctrination talking.

The truthful answer is probably " ... because of typesetting and Document Engineering". In the very early (early 80s) days I met Brian Kernighan because of a common interest in typesetting (see "202 Jailbreak"). At the tail end of the 202 era the possibility of proofing our stuff on a brand new PostScript laserwriter led me to start a journal called "Electronic Publishing" which used exclusively PostScript to typeset its articles and this PostScript was then archived. John and Chuck of Adobe got to hear about this and let us in early on the Acrobat/PDF scene. And so on.

Once you know a couple you get introduced to others, who introduce you to others... it's a snowball effect.

+ProfDaveB - my hat is off to you

He is one of them...

I imagine it's a bit like the Casino industry it's a small industry but unique and it seems everyone knows everyone else. I've met people from Japan, Australia, US, Monte Carlo, Austria, Morocco and I'm just in small town Canada.

Also 88mb to download adobe vs 5mb for sumatra. Makes you wonder wtf else comes with that adobe installer

+Ardulogger PDF is just an awful format. Implementing all the features apparently requires that many megabytes.

People don't make PDFs properly, if they did you would not have any issues.

why not create alternative format to pdf for example Gzip +image ...

@@ioijiopjkiopjkp xpdf on Linux and BSD's: 2.1Mb.

"security"

The only security was that the editor cost money, while there the viewer-reader was free. For crying out loud, PDF is not meant to be used for documents "not to be changed", it is meant to communicate documents where layout preservation is important. All other use cases are wrong format usage and cause more problems than they solve.

Wait, these were instructors in the computing fields?!

How do I get a PDF file under my flatbed scanner ?

So why does every lease agreement ever come as a pdf and I have to input the fields if it's not meant to be edited

@@csmlyly5736 Just to make life difficult

ever heard of html? it's pretty great! ;)

sofias. orange People use HTML for articles? That's crazy!

LeiosOS well they should, anyway. :P in my experience it's still slightly lacking in print capabilities, and columns are still not working that well (interestingly Edge does a good job here). but when it comes to presentations, there are some *really* great html solutions out there. i did a presentation in svg once. very much like prezi. unfortunately it completely broke on the browser of the presentation machine (only tested it on mine) and the text was completely unreadable. ^^; probably would work fine now, tho :P

Nah, not that crazy anymore. It is super flexible. You can achieve so much more these days with web technologies than you can with PDF. Virtually every device has a web browser available, and not only can you display web pages on very different devices, you can also make specific adjustments to optimize pages for say different screen resolutions (and yes, also for print). Inconsistencies across browsers are becoming less and less of an issue. HTML also provides the text data in a structured form, which is one of the big, big shortcomings of PDF. Ever tried to copy and paste from a PDF and got a completely chopped mess? And PDF is just a nightmare if you want to include multimedia content such as Videos. Video, audio, animations all work beautifully and consistently (if done right) in HTML5, which is very nice for presentations. The only real advantage that PDF holds today is that it allows perfect reproduction of documents, which is is essential for the print industry.

What he describes with architectural drawing couldn't be more right. I used to have to program macros to get the plot to look just right and it was an absolute nightmare between machines. Until we realized we could just always print it digitally as a pdf and then print that as a paper document, we could NEVER get repeatable results. Don't get me wrong, it was passable but for whatever reason, you could never get uniformity with AutoCAD even if you installed the same version, same fonts, etc. on a different machine. The plots were always different, especially with a different printer. I honestly thought it was kind of bloatware until I needed it and then came to realize what a godsend it was.

I think your issue is that you need a bigger printer. It's nothing to do with the file format.

Thanks! Since the demographic of Computerphile peaks with people much younger than we are,it's nice to get a "thumbs up" from a fellow oldie

Absolute positioning

It's all PostScript behind the scenes, using vector image formats.

he didn't know Charles Babbage and Ada Lovelace, i think.

You can't be sure, though

He is a genius, so I assume he has part in every great achievements.

I don't think he was involved in general recursive functions.

Except PDFs aren't all 'finished' !

Didn’t he pass away last week?

@@unnamedchannel1237 Wait what‽ Secondly pls check the date of commenting

They thought you what? WHAT!?

It has happened to me too, many, too many times already....:(

I'm Jack's Nipples Hehe. Don't believe everything you read on the Internet, kid!

never seen that before.

I'm from that background so maybe I don't see it but I was under the impression that most of the time they are pretty good at putting things in layman's terms. Some of the so and image codec videos are a bit heavier though.

TheSpacecraftX Sometimes they are. I wouldn't call myself completely computer illiterate (I'm quite confident using them to do everything I need to do), but I don't have any clue about the underlying mechanics or programming of hardware and software etc. That just goes over my head. I like the computerphile videos that are about computer-related topics I can understand on a practical level (e.g. the history of PDFs, how to use programs programs, the importance of password security etc.) or are of theoretical interest like the ones on artificial intelligence or electronic voting that don't require me to understand the minutiae. Same goes with numberphile to be honest. It used to be fun facts and trivia about numbers and mathematical patterns or riddles, but now it is a bit hard-core for me.

Why use PDF for docs ? Surely 'paperless docs' = html ?

Was that a DOS WP ? I don't think I ever saw it as a DOS prog.

No other word processor had a “Reveal Codes” function because no other word processor used embedded codes for formatting.

Completely wrong.

Adobe reader is free, but Acrobat (the editor), costs a fortune.

how ??? the acrobat ??? costs??

that, and hoping that people will not notice the spamware included in the installer

Reader is free, but the editor costs money (adobe acrobat at least, there are free editors though).

***** how ?? if those r free then how money ???

This! Also even mobile readers feel so much less convenient than scrolling through a webpage. PDF is good for printing but the strict control it gives to the publisher/creator means that any reader software fights an uphill battle to make it less "accurate" and more convenient instead. PDF was built around presentation, as opposed to other formats built around semantics.

@@4.0.4 A4 on 16:9 isn't so bad - once you've got your monitor to stand up reliably on its end.

Nice story -- and an ingenious way to exert quality control on variable-quality incoming PostScript.

divide by 0 error...

Segmentation fault.

Allri-- **turns into 8 sideways**

Dud you jinx it.

It's not the format, not the technology, but its open nature. All competitors are/have been proprietary. It's not about the money. For being arcane and complicated, PDF has actually been very expensive until recently. However, being open means you don't have to worry about Adobe killing it, dropping support, breaking it, etc. A modified version called PDF/A is specifically designed for long-term archival. Have you tried to open 15-year old web sites, Word documents, CAD drawings? I can tell you, it's impossible. PDF/A files will render pixel perfectly 80 years from now, even if your special "Garamond Heavy Cyrillic" TrueType font is gone, even when displays will be 8K HDR 3D.

I thought that would be mentioned as the main point

@@lewisfilby2394 It just means converting the file first, then making the edit.

Wasn't that the point of RTF ?

I just use Chrome to open pdfs

SumatraPDF or Evince instead of Adobe Reader.

Companies keep sending TIFF files that adobe can't read, on my phone at least. Don't know about the computer version. I tried several TIFF-readers. More than half the time it can't read the TIFF it is supposed to be designed to read. I eventually uploaded the file to google drive, where I couldn't find it except in recent files, but it can read *all* TIFF and PDF and pretty much everything else I ever threw at it.

@@stylis666 TIFF isn't a single format. It's a whole family of formats, and a lot of TIFF readers can read some but not all of them.

Honestly for reading PDFs I just use Google Chrome (or other web browsers like Firefox/Safari have them too). Much snappier and simple than the overbloated Adobe Reader.

ironic because the mobile version is one of the better Android apps for reading PDFs.

@@hengineer True, but even it can be very slow to open documents sometimes.

Stop using Adobe Reader then. There are tons of free alternative PDF readers out there, many of which are much better than Adobe's. My personal favorite is Sumatra PDF-it's clean, simple, not cluttered with features no one's asked for and much, much faster than Adobe Reader. The only downside is printing-it's using bitmaps instead of post script to communicate with the printer (that's about 100 MB of data sent to the printer per page) which makes it unsuitable for printing out large documents. Also the official web page looks like it was made by a ten year old, but the program is great.

What are you talking about? Sumatra's webpage is amazing. It's, clean, uncluttered and doesn't have any useless features that nobody asked for. It just gives you an About page, a Changelog, the Downloads and a Donation page. It literally doesn't need to do anything else. Webpages should stop adding 500 lines of CSS and JavaScript unless it's really necessary. Don't even get me started on the shitfest that have Facebook and KZfaq become in the last 5 years. They haven't added any features, but each page is three times heavier.

@K.D.P. Ross ha ha, then it's useless to me. I only ever used the reader. When I got into Linux I used the distiller a few times. I totally missed the point of this software. I think that's funny lol!! Thx for the info👍🤣👍

i remember almost breaking down in tears after I had downloaded my first pdf book and didn't know about acrobat reader for viewing the pdf... about 2001.

+fdagpigj E thanks, sorted

I think you had it right first time (not that it matters): When "u" makes the same sound as the "y" in "you," or "o" makes the same sound as "w" in "won," then a is used. The word-initial "y" sound ("unicorn") is actually a glide [j] phonetically, which has consonantal properties; consequently, it is treated as a consonant, requiring "a."

Michael Graham It originally said "an", they fixed it (and even replied saying so) so it says "a", and unless I'm misreading your reply, that is how it's supposed to be?

No, it's me that's missing something. I still saw "an" and misread what you wrote.

Question, would you say "Snake starts with *a* S" or "Snake starts with *an* S"? I would definitely say "an Esperanto speaker," but that starts with an e.