Designed to, but does it do it well without the problems noted earlier in the article?
The searchable PDFs get searched, and the just-pictures-of-words ones get fed through their (quite good, IMHO) OCR.
I use it all the time. It's remarkably good for locating the details I need in the poorly-organized ~1,200 page factory manual for my Honda.
(Well, it's not necessarily organized poorly. It's just designed with the clear intent that it is mostly to serve as a set of repair instructions, and sometimes I don't want repair instructions. Sometimes I want to know how a thing works for my own cognitive benefit instead of how diagnose and R&R it as a series of steps.)
It also was able to parse my tax forms in 3 languages.
No strong argument imo for replacing the pdf.
If people want to manage version/access etc, they are going to do it right the first time with existing document format and permission control mechanism, ranging from "making rhe document only accessible to certain users" to "have someone read a document in a specific room", which has worked reasonably well.
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.
https://scottlocklin.wordpress.com/2023/05/31/djvu-and-its-c...
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 They’ve intentionally omitted a download feature to prevent access to outdated versions, but otherwise, the experience seems no different from an ordinary PDF reader.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.
* 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
pseudolus•2h ago