[pavo-etc]

> limited JS runtime of the PDF engine

humanity has gone too far

[miki123211]

Seriously though, is there another format that:

1. Can be easily and freely shared by email / cloud drive, including assets, images and fonts.

2. Supports form filling and saving the form data in the file directly (as opposed to sending it somewhere over HTTP). Basically the electronic equivalent of a paper form that can be filled, send by email and stay filled.

3. Supports (cryptographic) signatures that are again part of the document, and can easily and securely be verified by end users. This is a very important use case in the EU, where electronic signatures are based on cryptography, not "I pinky swear I'm John Smith" DocuSign.

4. Has perfect print fidelity.

We keep complaining about PDF (and rightly so), but there's truly no other format to replace it. The W3c / Whatwg / whatever could probably come up with one based on web technologies, but they haven't yet.

There's Epub which solves a very narrow use case of PDF (electronic book distribution where perfect control over presentation is not required), but nothing that solves the "business" use cases.

[kragen]

Adding JS to PDF seriously undermines these benefits. If Turing-complete logic can draw arbitrary images on the document, you can no longer have any print fidelity at all, and what you signed cryptographically may have said things you didn't know it said. It may start interfering with #1 if email systems start blocking "malicious" PDF features, too. Only benefit #2 survives.

I have no idea what the folks at Adobe were thinking when they decided to add this feature that could eventually eliminate most of the benefits of their product.

None of this is to say that the Doom implementation is anything less than a very cool hack.

[quotemstr]

:-) I'll never quite appreciate why people say things like this. Having some kind of embedded scripting is useful for all sorts of things, often form validation. A sufficiently complex validation system becomes Turing complete, so you might as well skip the hassle of a custom language and go right to JavaScript. Once you have JavaScript, input, and some way of updating a graphical pixel grid, you're at Doom-completeness. I think it's a wonderful, not terrible, thing that computation and programmability are so cheap they've become ubiquitous even in the most mundane applications

[llm_trw]

We had that language, it was postscript.

Then pdf came along and said: no this is too dangerous the only thing in a document should be layout information not arbitrary code.

And here we are two decades later.

My hatred of pdf has no end. It killed postscript for dynamic pages and djvu for static pages.

[p_ing]

JS is what made these file types into the Pretty Dangerous Format. Numerous vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat surfaced thanks to the embedded JS engine.

Updating the Acrobat client across an enterprise used to be quite burdensome.

[hardwaresofton]

That’s the only way we know how to go

[datavirtue]

This. I'm eagerly awaiting the replicators that will explore the cosmos and spread the knowledge of our existence. If we can get them done before we poison ourselves.