Well, that was a nonsense article. Badly written software has trouble with PDFs, accessibility is an afterthought (which, sadly, is true of most things) and some small group thinks they can invent a better wheel, ignoring the fact that they’d have to do a lot of work to overcome the first mover advantages of HTML and PDF and this comment now has more information than the original article thanks to that clause beginning with “ignoring”.

> Yet Duff Johnson, head of the PDF Association, protector of the format, argues that the fault lies not in the file type but in ourselves. He contends that there is no reason developers cannot build bots that are able to use PDFs. The AI assistant embedded in Acrobat, Adobe’s PDF reader, is designed to do precisely that, notes Leonard Rosenthol, the software firm’s PDF guru.

Designed to, but does it do it well without the problems noted earlier in the article?

Seems to be a weak pitch for an Israeli startup called Factify. Their new document type is also closed sourced which seems like an obvious showstopper for a ubiquitous global document replacement, especially in today's extremely heated and untrustworthy environment.

No strong argument imo for replacing the pdf.

There are PDF files and there are PDF files. Many (most?) PDFs I run into are generated from Microsoft Word or some other MS product with no structure at all. The majority of people use MS products don't understand or care about structure. The WYSIWYG imperative means lots of markup to describe font size, color, and decoration, to make every section heading look the same without ever designating the text as a section head. The same happens with paragraphs, page breaks, and column flow. The resulting document looks correct enough to the creator. Other people who have a different version of Word, different fonts, and a thousand other little differences, won't see it correctly. That leads our author to generate a PDF, probably with embedded fonts, to ensure uniform appearance across these thousand little exceptions.

The result is a document with the content mixed up so incomprehensibly with appearance controls as to be both unreadable and without any residue of the underlying intended structure of the document's sections, headers, figures, paragraphs, captions, footnotes, or anything.

And then there's PDF files which are nothing more than a series of images of pages of text. If you're lucky and the scans are clean a good OCR might be able to recover most of the content.

What I'm saying is, it doesn't matter the tool, if authors don't encode structure and formatting in semantically meaningful ways.

Makes me remember of this, which was posted a few days ago here in HN:

https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/05/31/djvu-and-its-c...

The war against pdfs is based on AI being too stupid to read them? That's a condemnation of AI, not pdfs. I, a natural intelligence, can easily read pdfs.

I'll miss getting documentation as a pile of pictures in a PDF.

For context, here is the startup's website: https://www.factify.com/. The site consists of only two main pages: the landing page and a "careers" section.

Based on the site, the service appears to be little more than a document hosting platform with tracking features, such as monitoring who copied the document and the specific paragraphs they selected. They’ve intentionally omitted a download feature to prevent access to outdated versions, but otherwise, the experience seems no different from an ordinary PDF reader.

There is no mention of a "new standard" on their front page. I suspect they don't actually convert the documents. They likely just convert pages to encrypted images and use client-side rendering for text elements to allow for selection and copying.

This looks like an sponsored article. Very poor quality.

My biggest gripes:

* you cannot easily view a PDF in dark mode. Solutions do exist, but there are always some limitations

* poor experience reading on mobile device (mentioned in the article). You can use "Reflow" features provided by Acrobat or similar tools, but they often don't work offline, not to mention Acrobat is bloated and filled with dark patterns that trick you into buying a subscription