This guy is a legend, it seems. The amount of early computer technology this professor was apparently involved in (or in close contact with its creators) is astonishing.
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 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.
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
@@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.
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...
One of the most interesting PDFs I've seen is the Wisconsin e-File form. It does a bunch of things I don't see in other PDF files. The first page has various checkboxes and things to adjust which schedules you want, the number of W2's and other tax situations - once you do that the entire form reconfigures itself to allow you to enter what you indicated. It fills in certain numbers and calculates a few things automatically, and lets you attach additional documents before clicking the button on the form that tells the PDF to itself to the state revenue. -- PDFs can do a LOT more than most people utilize it for.
Acrobat Reader and PDF files in general felt a lot like the RealPlayer of documents for us mortal people who just wanted to look through a manual or a brochure online.
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.
I never really appreciated just how great PDF was until I worked on a full rebrand for a premium horse feed company, digital, print, packaging, uniforms. To be able to have that universal format that worked in every step of the process with certainty was amazing.
I'm so thankful for PDF. Its easy to work with, I don't worry about it having any problem displaying for anyone. If I send someone a pdf, I know what they received, and that they should be able to open it on just about anything they are using. Truly an underrated program that is used so commonly.
First time I saw a PDF displayed on-screen was at a electronic engineer's place. The data sheet was in that newfangled PD format, and it just looked beautiful: drawings, text, tables, diagrams, all smooth and crisp at the same time, because they all were rasterised with anti-aliasing. I was hooked and ordered my first CD-based archive of some monthly computer magazine right away.
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.
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.
The funniest part is that Acrobat Reader these days is way worse than free alternatives. They consistently get encoding wrong, so I've been forced to use Sumatra to get the encoding right in my documents.
I've seen some very bad full justification in my day, even though I don't own an e-book reader, but what you forced onto my retina at 3:17 is a whole new kind of evil.
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.
I get asked that also quite often I usually reply: pdf is like the digital version of printing a document in paper, you are supposed to use it for reading and sharing but not for editing it.
as late as mid-2003 the instructors at my college didn't know what to do with my PDF assignment submissions. I developed the habit of producing a rich text and PDF copy of each paper, because so many instructors insisted that rich text was fine. every single time they ended up using the PDF to grade my work because the rich text turned to garbage on their computer (most of which I had installed and maintained perviously when I worked for the college's IT dept... so I knew what to expect) and I knew they used the PDFs because they'd email me asking how to open them.
That's easy. PDF are just media files that are designed with all content contained inside the file, with security to stop people from changing the information easily. Also as important was the ability for the PDF to look the same everywhere, to everyone. When I first learned how to write my own PDFs it felt amazing. Then again this was back 15 - 20 years.
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.
Very informative, thank you. I guess I hadn't really thought about it, and in hindsight it seems obvious, but before this I didn't really understand what PDF was for. I love learning things, so thanks again. :)
I remember joining the Microchip BBS some time in the early 90s and they had posted electronic copies of datasheets but we couldn't read them. I think they were in some private DTP format back then. I'm not sure what year Microchip adopted PDF. I believe it was a game changer in electronics. Also my explanation was that PDF was "like printing it out for someone to read except you get a file instead of paper."
I always thought that PDF was a PITA because I only had experience with receiving documents that could more easily have been sent as a Word file. Just recently I received a set of model yacht plans in PDF that had to be printed at about A1 size. It opened my eyes to a whole new world. I could look at the plan on my screen. I could take the .pdf file to the local printing shop and have it printed full size. The scale bar on the print was exactly the size it was meant to be. The print looked exactly like it did on my screen. Professor Brailsford I thank you for your explanation that has tied everything together and the penny has now dropped. For my purposes .pdf is still not the best for documents, but it is a fantastic format for drawings, plans, etc. I hope never again to expand drawings, put them on A4 and sticky tape them together. Thank you.
I love your videos, professor. I am roughly your age so I lived through a lot of the history of computer science that you describe. It really brings back memories to hear you talk about it. Thanks.
Honestly, I could not imagine doing research without LaTeX / pdf files. I use it for articles, presentations, notes... Seriously everything I send people uses pdf.
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.
As a pro typesetting and graphics company in the 1990 era we were extremely keen on the idea of PDF, but it had a persistent problem for quite a long time with white type and white lines which disappeared as though they were not there at all. Acrobat has been amazing, but annoying with many updates that seemed to us to be worse or with less functionality than the older versions, especially as we used Pitstop with it as well.
And as a kid growing up with PDF files already in use, it's easy to not realize how freaking revolutionary that was. And the reasons he describes are the very reasons I had acrobat reader, to look at & print documents (for free).
Never someone recognized the divergence between a 'working document' and a 'presentation document'. Word format and such are 'working document' not a finished product, PDF is!
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.
I think the problem with pdf was acrobat reader. That program caused me so much grief in the past, and was always trying to install updates. Moving to mac and using Preview made my enjoyment of the pdf format increase exponentially.
Very rarely use actual Acrobat Reader but PDF is a truly great format. I use it as a kind of paperless paper for documents. The one thing I hate, though, is when forms are simply "copied" to this format rather than being the machine completable things the format is capable of doing. I am no good at handwritten form completion and frequently find myself using something like Xournal and a modified "monospace with thin spaces" font to overlay text onto such forms.
I remember well during mid and late 90's that you couldn't create a PDF document for free. The acrobat PDF reader was free but the office plugin for converting word documents to PDF wasn't free at all. Only afterwards and especially with OpenOffice it became free.
PDF is a document format just like any other. The only difference is that Adobe does not feel it is cool to change how it works for every release like Microsoft does. I worked for a company that thought that they should use PDF because they thought you couldn't edit it. Sigh.
It’s clear one of the design goals for PDF was that it would be easy to print on PostScript printers -- basically you prefix a PostScript prelude to define those one- or two-character PDF operators as synonyms for their direct PostScript equivalents, then send the contents of the page as is, end with a “showpage”, and out it comes. It seems in the beginning they couldn’t quite decide whether PDF would be a text or a binary format. They soon realized, of course, that conversions between differing OS-specific line-ending conventions would corrupt the object table if a PDF file was treated as text, so they added a recommendation (which might still be in the spec) that PDF generators include some random binary garbage near the start of the file, to stop format sniffers from concluding that they were dealing with a text file.
Back in the 90s I always got so upset when somebody had made a PDF out of some simple text file. What was a 10kB download suddenly ballooned to 5MB, in the days of ~4kB/s downloads. It was the difference between "instant" and "go get a sandwich, then eat it, and maybe it'll be done by then". Most of the time, it was totally unnecessary. Whoever did it did so because they thought it looked nicer, or more professional, or just that they were supposed to do that. I'm not sure I ever ran into a legitimate use of PDFs until I was an adult.
In the mid-90s I worked for a company who did hardware and software for the printing industry. We ate, lived and breathed PostScript. One product we did was a PostScript sanitizer to take the weird PostScript some applications generated and make it more suitable for further processing. The sort of thing we dealt with was code that said "0 setlinewidth". This gave a minimum thickness line on paper at 300 dpi (OK), but nothing on a 2400 dpi printing plate (not OK). One of the tools we used was Acrobat. Read bizarre PostScript, turn it in to (very early) PDF, write nice clean PostScript from the PDF.
What a quirky little story about how PDF became the norm for document transfer, and how it nearly didn't happen. I relate to this because of my own early experiences with Acrobat PDF back in 1995'6 when I was briefly working at Fineline Design & Print in Hungerford. Oh the joys of trying to open, edit and save PDF back then in its infancy. I remember hating it. Now it's excellent and easy to use. Any way this made me smile.
I remember Unix people would just offer Postscript files for interchange, which we could make quite easily with TeX and troff/groff. PDF really is just an extension of that, the transformation from PS to PDF is both straightforward and reversible. Which of course Brailsford would know all about, lol.
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.
Is/can there be a video on how PDF's work? I'm still mind boggled by the concept of how it seems to be the only (popular) format that works on 99% of devices for rendering something correctly.
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.
When i was an art student I know we were interested in PDFs because it allowed you to bake in fonts and your graphic over/under lays and reduce file size.
I remember wondering why it was called "portable" while (initially) only being supported on Windows and Mac, and not the OS that I was using. Had you called it "Printable Document Format" I would have understood its strength right away. (Of course, these days it's supported quite well.)
Well you sure gave a much better explanation of what pdf was about compared to Adobe. It was basically take it or leave it when I asked them. Given that Adobe love applying the Australia Tax, I left it.
He also forgot to tell that, even tough it is possible, it's a little harder to change the content of PDF files. If someone wants to deliberately change a line in an official document in a Word file, that's very easy to do.
Adobe reader, the buggy unsafe office software people pay to have the pro version when its the same executable with a small change saying you paid and can use special features. Just read pdfs with firefox/chrome/edge and don't put adobe on your computer
I would of said it's like having a piece of electronic paper that you can see and looks the same whether it's viewed on a MAC, PC or anything else. You can mark in up with a virtual pen or pencil, add notes and virtual sign it (if need be) and send it to someone else who can see it exactly the same on his computer and counter sign it (if need be), basically paper without the paper.
This guy is such a brilliant mind and a truly wonderful storyteller. Here's an interesting question - do you reckon in fifty years time there will be similar videos with some elderly distinguished professor telling us about how they first developed TikTok? 😛
The acrobat reader has always felt clunky and old. It always seems to be a decade behind the times as far as user interface, it takes a ton of memory to load up, and when scrolling between pages it takes forever to load the next page. It seems that the loading times can be reduced by only loading the required instructions/libraries for a given document.
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.
Adobe needs to stop auto-activating their update "service". I keep turning it off because it sucks system resources but it keeps turning itself on again. It also needs to stop trying to sneak McAffee onto my system. How many times do I have to uncheck that "install mcaffee" box before they get the hint?
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 RUclips become in the last 5 years. They haven't added any features, but each page is three times heavier.
Try reading PDF on your phone to see how universal it is. Either you read what is written there and have to scroll all directions constantly, or you see whole page but cannot read it because you need super-retina display and a magnifier then. Let alone that most of PDFs are _images_ you cannot just do text search on them. Semantics is completely lost it is not "a text with table underneath" instead it's "set of letter-looting shapes and straight line soup below sprinkled with character-looking shapes mixed in".
I vaguely remember that when I was a student in a university in the early/mid 90's, Postscript was something like a "no, unless you pay for it" and then there were dubious workarounds like Ghostscript and alike that allowed poor students to do some high quality printings of some documents that were in PS. But I cannot remember how PDF entered the scene. It must have been a quite big thing for a computer enthusiast like me, but I just do not have specific memories about it from those early days.
I love PDF's for things like eBooks and GameManuals and to save a webpage. The thing I like about PDF, is that you get 1 single file that contains all the pictures and maintains the formatting. I have "saved webpage" before and it creates a HTM/HTML file and a folder with pictures and possibly even sub folders and scrips and so on and you might accidentally move the source HTM/HTML file or accidentally move/delete the images/files folder, which makes stuff not appear. It's just overall a bad way to preserve information with photos. Saving individual images for each page that have 50+ pages is also a mess. PDF solves these problems by putting it all into a single file. I know there are PDF's that are nothing but scans of images, but still it is in a single file, which is far more practical. Also, sharing a single PDF is far easier than sharing a folder with 50+ images. Don't misunderstand me and think I am saying that all photos should be put into PDF format, because that would be HORRIBLE. You wouldn't want a 150,000 page PDF of all the photos you have ever taken with your camera or saved from other sources and then wait a year for that file to load and then try to find the PDF page that has the image you want to look at. PDF is not for browsing, PDF is for when you would NOT want the group of texts/images to ever be separated from each other because they would lose value. Also, I use SumatraPDF which is a small, quick loading, free PDF Viewer alternative. The reason I use it, is BECAUSE it has limited functionality. with Adobe PDF, people can embed internet links which can lead to malware infections. Adobe should add the option so that internet linked content is disabled by default and require you to enable the internet content. Also, they should have a "lite" version option that you can load by default, that has the limited functionality of SumatraPDF (The bare minimum) so that you can view the content, zoom in and out, fullscreen/side-by-side/pageview and print and browse chapters but not much else, that way, it can load as fast as SumatraPDF and protect you against potential security threats. For me personally, I use SumatraPDF just because it protects me from malware and it loads much faster. If Adobe had the OPTION to mimic this, while allowing you to switch to loading the full Adobe Feature Rich PDF program, then I would much rather use Adobe PDF, because I would get the benefit of quick loading and security, while being able to switch to a superior viewing experience. Unfortunately, when I work tech support (only as a passionate highly addictive hobby), I always install SumatraPDF for my friends/family because it is what I use, and because people who need general "tech support" to fix their PC's, need all programs that can avoid problems/malware as possible. Being that this is a recent video, it is possible that Adobe has fixed these issues, but I haven't checked lately. As I keep repeating, the 2 most important features for software to me is: 1) Shortest Loading time (and low resource usage). 2) Security (lacking features that can pose threats). I hope you find and read at least some of my comment.
I only use pdf for books to read on my mobile phone. It's great! No more juggling a book and a torch in bed; also you can alter the settings to have white text on a black background, which is much more restful to the eyes.
This guy is a legend, it seems. The amount of early computer technology this professor was apparently involved in (or in close contact with its creators) is astonishing.
Well it was just a bunch of chaps with ideas back then
Great story, but pity the person waiting in line behind him at the airport that day.
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.
Best storyteller ever.
He held my attention for sure and I could just listen to him for hours I think.
True.
Professor Brailsford has the best anecdotes on this channel, hands down
Agreed - I love his style - I could listen to him all day talking about his experiences in the industry.
I'm just happy we aren't forced to use adobes reader anymore.
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
Haha! Showing the user unchecking all the BS spam checkboxes when downloading an Adobe reader update.
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.
"What type of business do you do?"
"Tech."
"Welcome to America."
Lol, yea this is exactly how it goes for me . Don't want people in line glaring at me .
PDF was the first enterprise level attempt of a streamlined vulnerability distribution.
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
This guy is seriously an amazing storyteller. He held my attention the entire time.
5:53 Besides being free, not bundling it with malware also tends to help the adoption rate of software.
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?
One of the most interesting PDFs I've seen is the Wisconsin e-File form. It does a bunch of things I don't see in other PDF files. The first page has various checkboxes and things to adjust which schedules you want, the number of W2's and other tax situations - once you do that the entire form reconfigures itself to allow you to enter what you indicated. It fills in certain numbers and calculates a few things automatically, and lets you attach additional documents before clicking the button on the form that tells the PDF to itself to the state revenue. -- PDFs can do a LOT more than most people utilize it for.
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.
What a wonderful story.
The one person who downvoted this video works on Floor 4.
2:18 Can we have the 1hour version, only from Professor Brailsford. I'd enjoy it.
Acrobat Reader and PDF files in general felt a lot like the RealPlayer of documents for us mortal people who just wanted to look through a manual or a brochure online.
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.
I never really appreciated just how great PDF was until I worked on a full rebrand for a premium horse feed company, digital, print, packaging, uniforms. To be able to have that universal format that worked in every step of the process with certainty was amazing.
I'm so thankful for PDF. Its easy to work with, I don't worry about it having any problem displaying for anyone. If I send someone a pdf, I know what they received, and that they should be able to open it on just about anything they are using. Truly an underrated program that is used so commonly.
First time I saw a PDF displayed on-screen was at a electronic engineer's place. The data sheet was in that newfangled PD format, and it just looked beautiful: drawings, text, tables, diagrams, all smooth and crisp at the same time, because they all were rasterised with anti-aliasing. I was hooked and ordered my first CD-based archive of some monthly computer magazine right away.
Loved that passport story!
How does prof Brailsford know so many massively influential people in the industry?
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.
The funniest part is that Acrobat Reader these days is way worse than free alternatives. They consistently get encoding wrong, so I've been forced to use Sumatra to get the encoding right in my documents.
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.
I've seen some very bad full justification in my day, even though I don't own an e-book reader, but what you forced onto my retina at 3:17 is a whole new kind of evil.
+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.
I get asked that also quite often I usually reply: pdf is like the digital version of printing a document in paper, you are supposed to use it for reading and sharing but not for editing it.
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
as late as mid-2003 the instructors at my college didn't know what to do with my PDF assignment submissions. I developed the habit of producing a rich text and PDF copy of each paper, because so many instructors insisted that rich text was fine. every single time they ended up using the PDF to grade my work because the rich text turned to garbage on their computer (most of which I had installed and maintained perviously when I worked for the college's IT dept... so I knew what to expect) and I knew they used the PDFs because they'd email me asking how to open them.
Wait, these were instructors in the computing fields?!
That's easy. PDF are just media files that are designed with all content contained inside the file, with security to stop people from changing the information easily. Also as important was the ability for the PDF to look the same everywhere, to everyone.
When I first learned how to write my own PDFs it felt amazing. Then again this was back 15 - 20 years.
"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.
Very informative, thank you. I guess I hadn't really thought about it, and in hindsight it seems obvious, but before this I didn't really understand what PDF was for. I love learning things, so thanks again. :)
I remember joining the Microchip BBS some time in the early 90s and they had posted electronic copies of datasheets but we couldn't read them. I think they were in some private DTP format back then. I'm not sure what year Microchip adopted PDF.
I believe it was a game changer in electronics.
Also my explanation was that PDF was "like printing it out for someone to read except you get a file instead of paper."
This man is a pleasure to listen to... I'd love to have professors like him back in the day.
Ah, the days when immigration personnel actually had brains...
PDF is especially useful for sheet music, where each note, dot, line slur has to be at its exact place. I wonder how they do this!
Absolute positioning
It's all PostScript behind the scenes, using vector image formats.
I always thought that PDF was a PITA because I only had experience with receiving documents that could more easily have been sent as a Word file. Just recently I received a set of model yacht plans in PDF that had to be printed at about A1 size. It opened my eyes to a whole new world. I could look at the plan on my screen. I could take the .pdf file to the local printing shop and have it printed full size. The scale bar on the print was exactly the size it was meant to be. The print looked exactly like it did on my screen.
Professor Brailsford I thank you for your explanation that has tied everything together and the penny has now dropped. For my purposes .pdf is still not the best for documents, but it is a fantastic format for drawings, plans, etc. I hope never again to expand drawings, put them on A4 and sticky tape them together. Thank you.
I think your issue is that you need a bigger printer. It's nothing to do with the file format.
He tells the best stories. I could listen to him for hours.
I can watch this guy talk for hours! He should start a weekly podcast.
I love your videos, professor. I am roughly your age so I lived through a lot of the history of computer science that you describe. It really brings back memories to hear you talk about it.
Thanks.
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
Honestly, I could not imagine doing research without LaTeX / pdf files. I use it for articles, presentations, notes... Seriously everything I send people uses pdf.
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.
10 seconds in and already liked it, I love this mans storytelling, must be a great teacher :)
As a pro typesetting and graphics company in the 1990 era we were extremely keen on the idea of PDF, but it had a persistent problem for quite a long time with white type and white lines which disappeared as though they were not there at all. Acrobat has been amazing, but annoying with many updates that seemed to us to be worse or with less functionality than the older versions, especially as we used Pitstop with it as well.
And as a kid growing up with PDF files already in use, it's easy to not realize how freaking revolutionary that was. And the reasons he describes are the very reasons I had acrobat reader, to look at & print documents (for free).
Never someone recognized the divergence between a 'working document' and a 'presentation document'.
Word format and such are 'working document' not a finished product, PDF is!
Except PDFs aren't all 'finished' !
PDF is by far one of my favorite file types to view, it's absolutely fascinating.
Come to think of it, is there any aspect of computing history that Professor Brailsford was not a part of?
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.
Need MORE Professor Brailsford please!
Didn’t he pass away last week?
@@unnamedchannel1237
Wait what‽
Secondly pls check the date of commenting
Yay, a computerphile video that a non-programming /non-computer expert like me can understand!!
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.
I think the problem with pdf was acrobat reader. That program caused me so much grief in the past, and was always trying to install updates. Moving to mac and using Preview made my enjoyment of the pdf format increase exponentially.
Very rarely use actual Acrobat Reader but PDF is a truly great format. I use it as a kind of paperless paper for documents. The one thing I hate, though, is when forms are simply "copied" to this format rather than being the machine completable things the format is capable of doing. I am no good at handwritten form completion and frequently find myself using something like Xournal and a modified "monospace with thin spaces" font to overlay text onto such forms.
Why use PDF for docs ? Surely 'paperless docs' = html ?
"Post script", "Word Perfect", the 1980's... ah, the memories. Thanks for sharing!
That was an incredibly well told story. MORE from this guy please!
Its for hiding exploits and delivering them to the unsuspecting, a task it excels at.
I remember well during mid and late 90's that you couldn't create a PDF document for free. The acrobat PDF reader was free but the office plugin for converting word documents to PDF wasn't free at all. Only afterwards and especially with OpenOffice it became free.
5:55 first untick McAffee, untick True Key... THEN install :p
PDF is a document format just like any other. The only difference is that Adobe does not feel it is cool to change how it works for every release like Microsoft does.
I worked for a company that thought that they should use PDF because they thought you couldn't edit it. Sigh.
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!
I love hearing about the history of computing like this, even when it's not all that old.
It’s clear one of the design goals for PDF was that it would be easy to print on PostScript printers -- basically you prefix a PostScript prelude to define those one- or two-character PDF operators as synonyms for their direct PostScript equivalents, then send the contents of the page as is, end with a “showpage”, and out it comes.
It seems in the beginning they couldn’t quite decide whether PDF would be a text or a binary format. They soon realized, of course, that conversions between differing OS-specific line-ending conventions would corrupt the object table if a PDF file was treated as text, so they added a recommendation (which might still be in the spec) that PDF generators include some random binary garbage near the start of the file, to stop format sniffers from concluding that they were dealing with a text file.
I truly loved this for the story, I love these videos
oh wow the first 4 comments are people listing their position and they are in the correct order, what madness is this?
never seen that before.
I'd love to see some more videos about PDF. It is easily one of the greatest protocols/formats ever made in the history of computers.
Completely wrong.
How exactly does pdf make money for Adobe?
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 ???
Back in the 90s I always got so upset when somebody had made a PDF out of some simple text file. What was a 10kB download suddenly ballooned to 5MB, in the days of ~4kB/s downloads. It was the difference between "instant" and "go get a sandwich, then eat it, and maybe it'll be done by then".
Most of the time, it was totally unnecessary. Whoever did it did so because they thought it looked nicer, or more professional, or just that they were supposed to do that. I'm not sure I ever ran into a legitimate use of PDFs until I was an adult.
Hey, professor, we were WordPerfect refuseniks for a very good reason: "Reveal Codes" was the most useful feature on the face of the earth.
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.
In the mid-90s I worked for a company who did hardware and software for the printing industry. We ate, lived and breathed PostScript.
One product we did was a PostScript sanitizer to take the weird PostScript some applications generated and make it more suitable for further processing. The sort of thing we dealt with was code that said "0 setlinewidth". This gave a minimum thickness line on paper at 300 dpi (OK), but nothing on a 2400 dpi printing plate (not OK).
One of the tools we used was Acrobat. Read bizarre PostScript, turn it in to (very early) PDF, write nice clean PostScript from the PDF.
Nice story -- and an ingenious way to exert quality control on variable-quality incoming PostScript.
What a quirky little story about how PDF became the norm for document transfer, and how it nearly didn't happen. I relate to this because of my own early experiences with Acrobat PDF back in 1995'6 when I was briefly working at Fineline Design & Print in Hungerford. Oh the joys of trying to open, edit and save PDF back then in its infancy. I remember hating it. Now it's excellent and easy to use. Any way this made me smile.
Saw it only for the first 10 seconds but leads me to the statement: What a great guy.
I asked this question before myself but quickly learned how it was useful for me in business. This was an interesting and informative story.
what a nice story, worth every minute of it!
I remember Unix people would just offer Postscript files for interchange, which we could make quite easily with TeX and troff/groff. PDF really is just an extension of that, the transformation from PS to PDF is both straightforward and reversible. Which of course Brailsford would know all about, lol.
PDF, the reason why people still have to read A4 pages on 16:9 monitors. And it's not even machine readable.
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.
Look at that like to dislike ratio, that's pretty damn good.
divide by 0 error...
Segmentation fault.
Allri-- **turns into 8 sideways**
Dud you jinx it.
if you took a drink every time this guy mentions postscript, you'd be in the hospital
Is/can there be a video on how PDF's work? I'm still mind boggled by the concept of how it seems to be the only (popular) format that works on 99% of devices for rendering something correctly.
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 really love this guy, always has a great story.
Great Story! I could listen to this gentleman talk all day!
I would love to hear Prof Brailsford's thoughts (if any) on OpenXPS.
When i was an art student I know we were interested in PDFs because it allowed you to bake in fonts and your graphic over/under lays and reduce file size.
wrote a comment but it's invisible. it's not just quality it's security and integrity of the document. you can lock it to read only
I remember wondering why it was called "portable" while (initially) only being supported on Windows and Mac, and not the OS that I was using. Had you called it "Printable Document Format" I would have understood its strength right away.
(Of course, these days it's supported quite well.)
Well you sure gave a much better explanation of what pdf was about compared to Adobe. It was basically take it or leave it when I asked them. Given that Adobe love applying the Australia Tax, I left it.
He also forgot to tell that, even tough it is possible, it's a little harder to change the content of PDF files. If someone wants to deliberately change a line in an official document in a Word file, that's very easy to do.
I thought that would be mentioned as the main point
@@lewisfilby2394 It just means converting the file first, then making the edit.
Professor Brailsford
It's always interesting how technology and standards that we take for granted today came to be.
TSA used to use computers?
Adobe reader, the buggy unsafe office software people pay to have the pro version when its the same executable with a small change saying you paid and can use special features. Just read pdfs with firefox/chrome/edge and don't put adobe on your computer
I remember when PDF came out. I was very familiar with all those format compatibility problems, and PDF was a godsend for document exchange.
Wasn't that the point of RTF ?
I would of said it's like having a piece of electronic paper that you can see and looks the same whether it's viewed on a MAC, PC or anything else. You can mark in up with a virtual pen or pencil, add notes and virtual sign it (if need be) and send it to someone else who can see it exactly the same on his computer and counter sign it (if need be), basically paper without the paper.
This guy is such a brilliant mind and a truly wonderful storyteller. Here's an interesting question - do you reckon in fifty years time there will be similar videos with some elderly distinguished professor telling us about how they first developed TikTok? 😛
You should go on national TV and make everyone smile
The acrobat reader has always felt clunky and old. It always seems to be a decade behind the times as far as user interface, it takes a ton of memory to load up, and when scrolling between pages it takes forever to load the next page. It seems that the loading times can be reduced by only loading the required instructions/libraries for a given document.
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.
Adobe needs to stop auto-activating their update "service". I keep turning it off because it sucks
system resources but it keeps turning itself on again. It also needs to stop trying to sneak McAffee onto my system. How many times do I have to uncheck that "install mcaffee" box before they get the hint?
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 RUclips become in the last 5 years. They haven't added any features, but each page is three times heavier.
I didn't know much of that either. So thanks.
Try reading PDF on your phone to see how universal it is. Either you read what is written there and have to scroll all directions constantly, or you see whole page but cannot read it because you need super-retina display and a magnifier then. Let alone that most of PDFs are _images_ you cannot just do text search on them. Semantics is completely lost it is not "a text with table underneath" instead it's "set of letter-looting shapes and straight line soup below sprinkled with character-looking shapes mixed in".
What an awesome story teller
I vaguely remember that when I was a student in a university in the early/mid 90's, Postscript was something like a "no, unless you pay for it" and then there were dubious workarounds like Ghostscript and alike that allowed poor students to do some high quality printings of some documents that were in PS. But I cannot remember how PDF entered the scene. It must have been a quite big thing for a computer enthusiast like me, but I just do not have specific memories about it from those early days.
Thank you so much for your videos! This channel is such a wealth of knowledge :D
5:20
Please use capital first letters for names.
No
quasi Why not?
CAPITAL LETTERS ARE EVIL. ;)
sofias. orange BUT PEOPLE DESERVE TO HAVE THEIR NAMES WRITTEN IN CAPITAL, sofias, orange
This is so elaborated dear lord
David, you could even COUNT and I would still watch you with big PLEASURE ;-)
So cool, i love to hear stories!
When he said "It's a sophisticated *scalable graphics* model" was I the only one who instantly thought *SVG*? :P
I love PDF's for things like eBooks and GameManuals and to save a webpage. The thing I like about PDF, is that you get 1 single file that contains all the pictures and maintains the formatting. I have "saved webpage" before and it creates a HTM/HTML file and a folder with pictures and possibly even sub folders and scrips and so on and you might accidentally move the source HTM/HTML file or accidentally move/delete the images/files folder, which makes stuff not appear. It's just overall a bad way to preserve information with photos. Saving individual images for each page that have 50+ pages is also a mess. PDF solves these problems by putting it all into a single file. I know there are PDF's that are nothing but scans of images, but still it is in a single file, which is far more practical. Also, sharing a single PDF is far easier than sharing a folder with 50+ images. Don't misunderstand me and think I am saying that all photos should be put into PDF format, because that would be HORRIBLE. You wouldn't want a 150,000 page PDF of all the photos you have ever taken with your camera or saved from other sources and then wait a year for that file to load and then try to find the PDF page that has the image you want to look at. PDF is not for browsing, PDF is for when you would NOT want the group of texts/images to ever be separated from each other because they would lose value.
Also, I use SumatraPDF which is a small, quick loading, free PDF Viewer alternative. The reason I use it, is BECAUSE it has limited functionality. with Adobe PDF, people can embed internet links which can lead to malware infections. Adobe should add the option so that internet linked content is disabled by default and require you to enable the internet content. Also, they should have a "lite" version option that you can load by default, that has the limited functionality of SumatraPDF (The bare minimum) so that you can view the content, zoom in and out, fullscreen/side-by-side/pageview and print and browse chapters but not much else, that way, it can load as fast as SumatraPDF and protect you against potential security threats.
For me personally, I use SumatraPDF just because it protects me from malware and it loads much faster. If Adobe had the OPTION to mimic this, while allowing you to switch to loading the full Adobe Feature Rich PDF program, then I would much rather use Adobe PDF, because I would get the benefit of quick loading and security, while being able to switch to a superior viewing experience.
Unfortunately, when I work tech support (only as a passionate highly addictive hobby), I always install SumatraPDF for my friends/family because it is what I use, and because people who need general "tech support" to fix their PC's, need all programs that can avoid problems/malware as possible.
Being that this is a recent video, it is possible that Adobe has fixed these issues, but I haven't checked lately. As I keep repeating, the 2 most important features for software to me is:
1) Shortest Loading time (and low resource usage).
2) Security (lacking features that can pose threats).
I hope you find and read at least some of my comment.
Great storytelling and history lesson
I only use pdf for books to read on my mobile phone. It's great! No more juggling a book and a torch in bed; also you can alter the settings to have white text on a black background, which is much more restful to the eyes.
Absolutely great video.