if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because…

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. open domain image data .exr
  3. videos .av1
  4. lossless audio .flac
  5. lossy audio .opus
  6. subtitles srt/ass
  7. fonts .otf
  8. container mkv (doesnt contain .jxl)
  9. plain text utf-8 (many also say markup but disagree on the implementation)
  10. documents .odt
  11. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  12. configuration files toml
  13. typesetting typst
  14. interchange format .ora
  15. models .gltf / .glb
  16. daw session files .dawproject
  17. otdr measurement results .xml
  • ElectricMachmanEnglish
    20•1 year ago

    Isn’t the point of PDF that it can’t (or, perhaps more accurately, shouldn’t) be edited after the fact? It’s supposed to be immutable.

    • @tal@lemmy.todayEnglish
      12•1 year ago

      Unless you have explicitly digitally-signed the PDF, it’s not immutable. It’s maybe more-annoying to modify, but one shouldn’t rely on that.

      And there are ways to digitally-sign everything, though not all viewing software has incorporated signature verification.

    • @Infernal_pizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
      12•1 year ago

      I’m not sure if they were ever designed to be immutable, but that’s what a lot of people use it for because it’s harder to edit them. But there are programs that can edit PDFs. The main issue is I’m not aware of any free ones, and a lot of the alternatives don’t work as well as Adobe Acrobat which I hate! It’s always annoying at work when someone gets sent a document that they’re expected to edit and they don’t have an Acrobat license!

      • @danilolc@lemmy.eco.br
        6•1 year ago

        I’ve already edited some pdfs with LibreOffice writer. I don’t know if it’s suitable for that, but it worked for me

        • @tobbue@feddit.de
          4•1 year ago

          PDFs can contain a vast amount of different Image information, but often a good software that can edit vector data opens PDFs for editing easily. It might convert not embedded Fonts in paths and rasterize some transparency effects though. So Inkscape might work.

        • @Infernal_pizza@lemmy.worldEnglish
          3•1 year ago

          I’m assuming that will work similar to Microsoft Word where it’s fine for basic PDFs but if there are a lot of tables or images it can mess up the document?

        • @DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
          1•1 year ago

          think of it as though pdf is the container - it can contain all sorts of different data. I’d say you got real lucky being able to edit one with Writer without issues.

    • Natanael
      9•1 year ago

      No, it’s too preserve formatting when distributed. Editing is absolutely possible, always were, it’s just annoying to parse the structure when trying to preserve the format as you make changes

    • @DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      6•1 year ago

      No, although there’s probably a culture or convention around that.

      Originally the idea was that it’s a format which can contain fonts and other things so it will be rendered the same way on different devices even if those devices don’t have those fonts installed. The only reason it’s not commonly editable that I’m aware of is that it’s a fairly arcane proprietary spec.

      Now we have the openspec odt which can embed all the things, so pdf editing just doesn’t really seem to have any support.

      The established conventions around pdfs do kind of amaze me. Like contracts get emailed for printing & signing all the time. In many cases it would be trivial to edit the pdf and return your edited copy which the author is unlikely to ever read.