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
  • raubarno
    115•1 year ago

    Open Document Standard (.odt) for all documents. In all public institutions (it’s already a NATO standard for documents).

    Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.

    Actually, IMHO, there should be some better alternative to .odt as well. Something more out of a declarative/scripted fashion like LaTeX but still WYSIWYG. LaTeX (and XeTeX, for my use cases) is too messy for me to work with, especially when a package is Byzantine. And it can be non-reproducible if I share/reuse the same document somewhere else.

    Something has to be made with document files.

      • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
        14•1 year ago

        What’s messed up is that, technically, we do. Originally, OpenDocument was the ISO standard document format. But then, baffling everyone, Microsoft got the ISO to also have .docx as an ISO standard. So now we have 2 competing document standards, the second of which is simply worse.

    • megane-kun
      15•1 year ago

      I was too young to use it in any serious context, but I kinda dig how WordPerfect does formatting. It is hidden by default, but you can show them and manipulate them as needed.

      It might already be a thing, but I am imagining a LaTeX-based standard for document formatting would do well with a WYSIWYG editor that would hide the complexity by default, but is available for those who need to manipulate it.

      • raubarno
        11•1 year ago

        There are programs (LyX, TexMacs) that implement WYSIWYG for LaTeX, TexMacs is exceptionally good. I don’t know about the standards, though.

        Another problem with LaTeX and most of the other document formats is that they are so bloated and depend on many other tasks that it is hardly possible to embed the tool into a larger document. That’s a bit of criticism for UNIX design philosophy, as well. And LaTeX code is especially hard to make portable.

        There used to be a similar situation with PDFs, it was really hard to display a PDF embedded in application. Finally, Firefox pdf.js came in and solved that issue.

        The only embedded and easy-to-implement standard that describes a ‘document’ is HTML, for now (with Javascript for scripting). Only that it’s not aware of page layout. If only there’s an extension standard that could make a HTML page into a document…

        • megane-kunEnglish
          4•1 year ago

          I was actually thinking of something like markdown or HTML forming the base of that standard. But it’s almost impossible (is it?) to do page layout with either of them.

          But yeah! What I was thinking when I mentioned a LaTeX-based standard is to have a base set of “modules” (for a lack of a better term) that everyone should have and that would guarantee interoperability. That it’s possible to create a document with the exact layout one wants with just the base standard functionality. That things won’t be broken when opening up a document in a different editor.

          There could be additional modules to facilitate things, but nothing like the 90’s proprietary IE tags. The way I’m imagining this is that the additional modules would work on the base modules, making things slightly easier but that they ultimately depend on the base functionality.

          IDK, it’s really an idea that probably won’t work upon further investigation, but I just really like the idea of an open standard for documents based on LaTeX (kinda like how HTML has been for web pages), where you could work on it as a text file (with all the tags) if needed.

        • @MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
          3•1 year ago

          Finally, Firefox pdf.js came in and solved that issue.

          Which uses a bloated and convoluted scripting format specialized on manipulating html.

            • @MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
              1•1 year ago

              I don’t think so. pdf.js has all few monts a new XSS CVE, which is a web thing only. And if you use anything other than Adobe Reader/Acrobat…

    • @erogenouswarzone@lemmy.mlEnglish
      12•1 year ago

      Bro, trying to give padding in Ms word, when you know… YOU KNOOOOW… they can convert to html. It drives me up the wall.

      And don’t get me started on excel.

      Kill em all, I say.

  • Björn Tantau
    93•1 year ago

    zip or 7z for compressed archives. I hate that for some reason rar has become the defacto standard for piracy. It’s just so bad.

    The other day I saw a tar.gz containing a multipart-rar which contained an iso which contained a compressed bin file with an exe to decompress it. Soooo unnecessary.

    Edit: And the decompressed game of course has all of its compressed assets in renamed zip files.

    • @Bye@lemmy.world
      36•1 year ago

      It was originally rar because it’s so easy to separate into multiple files. Now you can do that in other formats, but the legacy has stuck.

    • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
      18•1 year ago

      .tar.zstd all the way IMO. I’ve almost entirely switched to archiving with zstd, it’s a fantastic format.

        • raubarno
          18•1 year ago

          Gzip is slower and outputs larger compression ratio. Zstandard, on the other hand, is terribly faster than any of the existing standards in means of compression speed, this is its killer feature. Also, it provides a bit better compression ratio than gzip citation_needed.

          • @Supermariofan67@programming.dev
            7•1 year ago

            Yes, all compression levels of gzip have some zstd compression level that is both faster and better in compression ratio.

            Additionally, the highest compression levels of zstd are comparable in compression level to LZMA while also being slightly faster in compression and many many times faster in decompression

        • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
          5•1 year ago

          gzip is very slow compared to zstd for similar levels of compression.

          The zstd algorithm is a project by the same author as lz4. lz4 was designed for decompression speed, zstd was designed to balance resource utilization, speed and compression ratio and it does a fantastic job of it.

      • Turun
        3•1 year ago

        The only annoying thing is that the extension for zstd compression is zst (no d). Tar does not recognize a zstd extension, only zst is automatically recognized and decompressed. Come on!

        • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
          2•1 year ago

          If we’re being entirely honest just about everything in the zstd ecosystem needs some basic UX love. Working with .tar.zst files in any GUI is an exercise in frustration as well.

          I think they recently implemented support for chunked decoding so reading files inside a zstd archive (like, say, seeking to read inside tar files) should start to improve sooner or later but some of the niceties we expect from compressed archives aren’t entirely there yet.

          Fantastic compression though!

          • Turun
            1•1 year ago

            Not sure what that does.

            Yes, you can use options to specify exactly what you want. But it should recognize .zstd as zstandard compression instead of going “I don’t know what this compression is”. I don’t want to have to specify the obvious extension just because I typed zstd instead of zst when creating the file.

  • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
    89•1 year ago

    This is the kind of thing i think about all the time so i have a few.

    • Archive files: .tar.zst
      • Produces better compression ratios than the DEFLATE compression algorithm (used by .zip and gzip/.gz) and does so faster.
      • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.
      • .tar.xz is also very good and seems more popular (probably since it was released 6 years earlier in 2009), but, when tuned to it’s maximum compression level, .tar.zst can achieve a compression ratio pretty close to LZMA (used by .tar.xz and .7z) and do it faster[1].

        zstd and xz trade blows in their compression ratio. Recompressing all packages to zstd with our options yields a total ~0.8% increase in package size on all of our packages combined, but the decompression time for all packages saw a ~1300% speedup.

    • Image files: JPEG XL/.jxl
      • “Why JPEG XL”
      • Free and open format.
      • Can handle lossy images, lossless images, images with transparency, images with layers, and animated images, giving it the potential of being a universal image format.
      • Much better quality and compression efficiency than current lossy and lossless image formats (.jpeg, .png, .gif).
      • Produces much smaller files for lossless images than AVIF[2]
      • Supports much larger resolutions than AVIF’s 9-megapixel limit (important for lossless images).
      • Supports up to 24-bit color depth, much more than AVIF’s 12-bit color depth limit (which, to be fair, is probably good enough).
    • Videos (Codec): AV1
      • Free and open format.
      • Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9[3].
    • Documents: OpenDocument / ODF / .odt

      it’s already a NATO standard for documents Because the Microsoft Word ones (.doc, .docx) are unusable outside the Microsoft Office ecosystem. I feel outraged every time I need to edit .docx file because it breaks the layout easily. And some older .doc files cannot even work with Microsoft Word.

    1. https://archlinux.org/news/now-using-zstandard-instead-of-xz-for-package-compression/ ↩︎

    2. https://tonisagrista.com/blog/2023/jpegxl-vs-avif/ ↩︎

    3. https://engineering.fb.com/2018/04/10/video-engineering/av1-beats-x264-and-libvpx-vp9-in-practical-use-case/ ↩︎

    • @lloram239@feddit.de
      14•1 year ago

      .tar is pretty bad as it lacks in index, making it impossible to quickly seek around in the file. The compression on top adds another layer of complication. It might still work great as tape archiver, but for sending files around the Internet it is quite horrible. It’s really just getting dragged around for cargo cult reasons, not because it’s good at the job it is doing.

      In general I find the archive situation a little annoying, as archives are largely completely unnecessary, that’s what we have directories for. But directories don’t exist as far as HTML is concerned and only single files can be downloaded easily. So everything has to get packed and unpacked again, for absolutely no reason. It’s a job computers should handle transparently in the background, not an explicit user action.

      Many file managers try to add support for .zip and allow you to go into them like it is a folder, but that abstraction is always quite leaky and never as smooth as it should be.

      • @tal@lemmy.today
        6•1 year ago

        .tar is pretty bad as it lacks in index, making it impossible to quickly seek around in the file.

        .tar.pixz/.tpxz has an index and uses LZMA and permits for parallel compression/decompression (increasingly-important on modern processors).

        https://github.com/vasi/pixz

        It’s packaged in Debian, and I assume other Linux distros.

        Only downside is that GNU tar doesn’t have a single-letter shortcut to use pixz as a compressor, the way it does “z” for gzip, “j” for bzip2, or “J” for xz (LZMA); gotta use the more-verbose “-Ipixz”.

        Also, while I don’t recommend it, IIRC gzip has a limited range that the effects of compression can propagate, and so even if you aren’t intentionally trying to provide random access, there is software that leverages this to hack in random access as well. I don’t recall whether someone has rigged it up with tar and indexing, but I suppose if someone were specifically determined to use gzip, one could go that route.

    • @jackpot@lemmy.mlOP
      10•1 year ago
      • By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.

      wait so does it do all of those things?

      • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
        23•1 year ago

        So there’s a tool called tar that creates an archive (a .tar file. Then theres a tool called zstd that can be used to compress files, including .tar files, which then becomes a .tar.zst file. And then you can encrypt your .tar.zst file using a tool called gpg, which would leave you with an encrypted, compressed .tar.zst.gpg archive.

        Now, most people aren’t doing everything in the terminal, so the process for most people would be pretty much the same as creating a ZIP archive.

    • @Laser@feddit.de
      9•1 year ago

      By separating the jobs of archiving (.tar), compressing (.zst), and (if you so choose) encrypting (.gpg), .tar.zst follows the Unix philosophy of “Make each program do one thing well.”.

      The problem here being that GnuPG does nothing really well.

      Videos (Codec): AV1

      • Much more efficient than x264 (used by .mp4) and VP9[3].

      AV1 is also much younger than H264 (AV1 is a specification, x264 is an implementation), and only recently have software-encoders become somewhat viable; a more apt comparison would have been AV1 to HEVC, though the latter is also somewhat old nowadays but still a competitive codec. Unfortunately currently there aren’t many options to use AV1 in a very meaningful way; you can encode your own media with it, but that’s about it; you can stream to YouTube, but YouTube will recode to another codec.

      • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
        6•1 year ago

        The problem here being that GnuPG does nothing really well.

        Could you elaborate? I’ve never had any issues with gpg before and curious what people are having issues with.

        Unfortunately currently there aren’t many options to use AV1 in a very meaningful way; you can encode your own media with it, but that’s about it; you can stream to YouTube, but YouTube will recode to another codec.

        AV1 has almost full browser support (iirc) and companies like YouTube, Netflix, and Meta have started moving over to AV1 from VP9 (since AV1 is the successor to VP9). But you’re right, it’s still working on adoption, but this is moreso just my dreamworld than it is a prediction for future standardization.

          • @tal@lemmy.today
            3•1 year ago

            Encrypting Email

            Don’t. Email is insecure . Even with PGP, it’s default-plaintext, which means that even if you do everything right, some totally reasonable person you mail, doing totally reasonable things, will invariably CC the quoted plaintext of your encrypted message to someone else

            Okay, provide me with an open standard that is widely-used that provides similar functionality.

            It isn’t there. There are parties who would like to move email users into their own little proprietary walled gardens, but not a replacement for email.

            The guy is literally saying that encrypting email is unacceptable because it hasn’t been built from the ground up to support encryption.

            I mean, the PGP guys added PGP to an existing system because otherwise nobody would use their nifty new system. Hell, it’s hard enough to get people to use PGP as it is. Saying “well, if everyone in the world just adopted a similar-but-new system that is more-amenable to encryption, that would be helpful”, sure, but people aren’t going to do that.

            • @Laser@feddit.de
              2•1 year ago

              The message to be taken from here is rather “don’t bother”, if you need secure communication use something else, if you’re just using it so that Google can’t read your mail it might be ok but don’t expect this solution to be secure or anything. It’s security theater for the reasons listed, but the threat model for some people is a powerful adversary who can spend millions on software to find something against you in your communication and controls at least a significant portion of the infrastructure your data travels through. Think about whistleblowers in oppressive regimes, it’s absolutely crucial there that no information at all leaks. There’s just no way to safely rely on mail + PGP for secure communication there, and if you’re fine with your secrets leaking at one point or another, you didn’t really need that felt security in the first place. But then again, you’re just doing what the blog calls LARPing in the first place.

    • @piexil@lemmy.world
      3•1 year ago

      I get better compression ratio with xz than zstd, both at highest. When building an Ubuntu squashFS

      Zstd is way faster though

    • @ronweasleysl@lemmy.mlEnglish
      2•1 year ago

      Damn didn’t realize that JXL was such a big deal. That whole JPEG recompression actually seems pretty damn cool as well. There was some noise about GNOME starting to make use of JXL in their ecosystem too…

          • @Longpork_afficianado@lemmy.nz
            24•1 year ago

            But it’s not a tarxz, it’s an xz containing a tar, and you perform operations from right to left until you arrive back at the original files with whatever extensions they use.

            If I compress an exe into a zip, would you expect that to be an exezip? No, you expect it to be file.exe.zip, informing you(and your system) that this file should first be unzipped, and then should be executed.

              • @DigitalJacobin@lemmy.mlEnglish
                4•1 year ago

                I get the frustration, but Windows is the one that strayed from convention/standard.

                Also, i should’ve asked this earlier, but doesn’t Windows also only look at the characters following the last dot in the filename when determining the file type? If so, then this should be fine for Windows, since there’s only one canonical file extension at a time, right?

          • GammaEnglish
            6•1 year ago

            I get your point. Since a .tar.zst file can be handled natively by tar, using .tzst instead does make sense.

          • @sebsch@discuss.tchncs.de
            5•1 year ago

            I would argue what windows does with the extensions is a bad idea. Why do you think engineers should do things in favour of these horrible decisions the most insecure OS is designed with?

              • @jaaval@sopuli.xyz
                1•1 year ago

                In this case it really seems this windows convention is bad though. It is uninformative. And abbreviations mandate understanding more file extensions for no good reason. And I say this as primarily a windows user. Hiding file extensions was always a bad idea. It tries to make a simple reduced UI in a place where simple UI is not desirable. If you want a lean UI you should not be handling files directly in the first place.

                Example.zip from the other comment is not a compressed .exe file, it’s a compressed archive containing the exe file and some metadata. Windows standard tools would be in real trouble trying to understand unarchived compressed files many programs might want to use for logging or other data dumps. And that means a lot of software use their own custom extensions that neither the system nor the user knows what to do with without the original software. Using standard system tools and conventions is generally preferable.

    • dinckel
      23•1 year ago

      The existence of zip, and especially rar files, actually hurts me. It’s slow, it’s insecure, and the compression is from the jurassic era. We can do better

      • @Supermariofan67@programming.dev
        13•1 year ago

        Zip has terrible compression ratio compared to modern formats, it’s also a mess of different partially incompatible implementations by different software, and also doesn’t enforce utf8 or any standard for that matter for filenames, leading to garbled names when extracting old files. Its encryption is vulnerable to a known-plaintext attack and its key-derivation function is very easy to brute force.

        Rar is proprietary. That alone is reason enough not to use it. It’s also very slow.

      • jtfletchbot
        8•1 year ago

        Again, I’m not the original poster. But zip isn’t as dense as 7zip, and I honestly haven’t seen rar are used much.

        Also, if I remember correctly, the audio codecs and compression types. The other poster listed are open source. But I could be mistaken. I know at least 7zip is and I believe opus or something like that is too

          • @tal@lemmy.today
            2•1 year ago

            I have seen RAR on Nexus, but I wouldn’t say that it’s common, at least for Bethesda’s games, which is where I’ve seen it.

            Things may have changed, but I recall that yenc (for ASCII encoding), RAR (for compression and segmenting) and PAR2 (for redundancy) were something of a standard for binary distribution on Usenet, and that’s probably the main place I’ve seen RAR. I think that the main selling point there was that it was just a format that was widely-available that supported segmented files.

          • jtfletchbot
            1•1 year ago

            That would explain why I don’t see them often. I haven’t been very active in gaming as of late, let alone modding. And I generally don’t pirate games. I’m cool with people that do, I just don’t personally. (Virus fears, being out of the loop long enough that I don’t know any good sites, etc)

            • @tal@lemmy.today
              2•1 year ago

              virus fears

              Honestly, if desktop operating systems supported better sandboxing of malware, I bet that piracy would increase.

      • @Supermariofan67@programming.dev
        15•1 year ago

        It’s a 30 year old format, and large amounts of research and innovation in lossy audio compression have occurred since then. Opus can achieve better quality in like 40% the bitrate. Also, the format is, much like zip, a mess of partially broken implementations in the early days (although now everyone uses LAME so not as big of a deal). Its container/stream format is very messy too. Also no native tag format so it needs ID3 tags which don’t enforce any standardized text encoding.

      • jtfletchbot
        6•1 year ago

        Not the original poster, but there are newer audio codecs that are more efficient at storing data than mp3, I believe. And there’s also lossless standards, compared to mp3’s lossy compression.

        • @folkrav@lemmy.world
          5•1 year ago

          I’ve yet to meet someone who can genuinely pass the 320kbps vs. lossless blind-test on anything but very high-end equipment.

          • @Supermariofan67@programming.dev
            11•1 year ago

            People are able to on some songs because mp3 is poorly optimized for certain sounds, especially cymbals. However, opus can achieve better quality than that at 128k with fewer outliers than mp3 at 320k, which saves a lot of space.

            • @folkrav@lemmy.world
              1•1 year ago

              Oh, yeah, not arguing that Opus is the superior format. It 100% is. Not questioning that.

              Indeed, the first place that gets hit by lower bitrates with MP3 is high frequencies. MP3 does have a pretty harsh cutoff at very high frequencies… that the vast majority of equipment can’t reproduce and most ears can’t hear. It’s relatively debated, some claim to be able to “feel” the overtones or something like that. I’m extremely sceptical, if I’m being honest. Last time I did the test - must have been a decade ago - I couldn’t distinguish lossless and high bitrate MP3 any more accurately than a coin toss.

          • @Knusper@feddit.de
            8•1 year ago

            We’re not talking lossless. The comment above specified Opus-encoded OGG, which is lossy.

            For example, I converted my music library from MP3 to OGG Opus and the size shrank from 16 GB to just 3 GB.

            And if converting from lossless to both MP3 and OGG Opus, then OGG does sound quite a bit better at smaller file sizes.

            So, the argument here is that musicians are underselling their art by primarily offering MP3 downloads. If the whole industry would just magically switch to OGG Opus, that would be quite an improvement for everyone involved.

            • @folkrav@lemmy.world
              1•1 year ago

              Yeah, I’m aware. I probably wasn’t clear. I think MP3 is just the default cause of immobilism. People still using “physical” medium/digital libraries rather than streaming are becoming a rare breed, and MP3 is just… good enough. Also familiarity - I remember googling “some song - some artist mp3” being the easy way to find single titles in my teenage years lol, if I wasn’t aware of the new codecs, I’d probably default to MP3 without asking myself the question.

              • @Knusper@feddit.de
                1•1 year ago

                Well, I understood this post to mean, if you had a wish, what would you wish for? Not necessarily that it’s realistic…

                I do agree with your points. Although, I can’t help but feel like more people would prefer local files, if those actually sounded better than the bandwidth-limited streaming services.

                • @folkrav@lemmy.world
                  2•1 year ago

                  I was expanding on the subject, generating side discussion stuff. Maybe I came across as standoffish - if that’s the case, I apologize.

                  I’m not sure how much people would care… Even back then, convincing people around me that their 128kbps MP3 sounded like it played on a tiny dollar store external speaker playing in a shower was almost impossible. Tons just download MP3s off of YouTube and call it a day. So many people don’t seem to care, unfortunately.

                  Convenience is the best motivator, IMHO. Downloading MP3s and loading them on your MP3 player used to be easy. You had sites literally letting you download songs directly. Torrents were big. Hell, going back, eMule/Kazaa, even Limewire, all was much easier than buying CDs and ripping them, or even when buying from online stores became a thing, with the DRM early on, etc, downloading was much less hassle.

                  Now people pay one price and get to listen to all the music they want to listen to.

          • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
            4•1 year ago

            320 kbps is approaching lossless audio compression bitrates.

            Opus does better in about half the space. And goes down to comically low bitrates. And his obscenely small latency. It’s not simple, but hot dang, is it good.

            The Quite Okay Imaging guy did a Quite Okay Audio follow-up, aiming for aggressive simplicity and sufficient performance, but it’s fixed at a bitrate of 278 kbps for stereo. It’s really competing with ADPCM for sound effects in video games.

            Personally, I think an aggressively simple frequency-domain format could displace MP3 as a no-brainer music library format, circa 128 kbps. All you have to do is get forty samples out of sixty-four bits. Bad answers are easy and plentiful. The trick is, when each frame barely lasts a millisecond, bad answers might work anyway.

          • neo (he/him)English
            4•1 year ago

            yeah, but guess what opus is transparent at? depending on the music, anywhere from 96kbps to 160kbps.

          • @tal@lemmy.today
            1•1 year ago

            I think that people overstate MP3’s losses, and I agree at 320k that it’s inaudible, but I can or at least have been able to tell at 128k, mostly with cymbals. Granted, cymbals aren’t that common, but it’s nice to not have them sound muddy. And, honestly, there just isn’t a lot of reason to use MP3 for anything compressed today, other than maybe hardware decoding on very small devices and widespread support. There are open standards that are better.

      • @MonkderZweite@feddit.ch
        1•1 year ago

        How are you going to recreate the MP3 audio artifacts that give a lot of music its originality, when encoding to OPUS?

        Oh, a gramophone user.

        Joke aside, i find ogg Opus often sounding better than the original. Probably something with it’s psychoacoustic optimizations.

      • @Supermariofan67@programming.dev
        2•1 year ago

        At both algorithms’ highest levels, xz seems to be on average a few percent better at compression ratio, but zstd is a bit faster at compression and much much faster at decompression. So if your goal is to compress as much as possible without regard to speed at all, xz -9 is better, but if you want compression that is almost as good but faster, zstd --long -19 is the way to go

        At the lower compression presets, zstd is both faster and compresses better

    • 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.

      • @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.

      • @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.

      • 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.

  • @IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    47•1 year ago

    I don’t know what to pick, but something else than PDF for the task of transferring documents between multiple systems. And yes, I know, PDF has it’s strengths and there’s a reason why it’s so widely used, but it doesn’t mean I have to like it.

    Additionally all proprietary formats, specially ones who have gained enough users so that they’re treated like a standard or requirement if you want to work with X.

    • kkard2English
      17•1 year ago

      oh it’s x, not x… i hate our timeline

    • @darklamer@lemmy.dbzer0.com
      5•1 year ago

      When PDF was introduced it made these things so much better than they were before that I’ll probably remain grateful for PDF forever and always forgive it all its flaws.

  • 𝕽𝖚𝖆𝖎𝖉𝖍𝖗𝖎𝖌𝖍
    44•1 year ago

    Resume information. There have been several attempts, but none have become an accepted standard.

    When I was a consultant, this was the one standard I longed for the most. A data file where I could put all of my information, and then filter and format it for each application. But ultimately, I wanted to be able to submit the information in a standardised format - without having to re-enter it endlessly into crappy web forms.

    I think things have gotten better today, but at the cost of a reliance on a monopoly (LinkedIn). And I’m not still in that sort of job market. But I think that desire was so strong it’ll last me until I’m in my grave.

  • @sunbeam60
    40•1 year ago

    SQLite for all “I’m going to write my own binary format because I is haxor” jobs.

    There are some specific cases where SQLite isn’t appropriate (streaming). But broadly it fits in 99% of cases.

    • @seaQueue@lemmy.world
      14•1 year ago

      To chase this - converting to json or another standardized format in every single case where someone is tempted to write their own custom parser. Never write custom parsers kids, they’re an absolutely horrible time-suck and you’ll be fixing them quite literally forever as you discover new and interesting ways for your input data to break them.

      Edit: it doesn’t have to be json, I really don’t care what format you use, just pick an existing data format that uses a robust, thoroughly tested, parser.

      • @taladar@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        4•1 year ago

        To add to that. Configuration file formats…just pick a standard one, do not write your own.

        And while we are at it, if there is even a remote chance that you have a “we will do everything declaratively” idea, just use an existing programming language for your file format instead of painfully growing some home-grown add-ons to your declarative format over the next decade or two because you were wrong about only needing a declarative format.

      • @sunbeam60
        2•1 year ago

        I’ll take “what’s that file format for $300 please”

  • Elise
    33•1 year ago

    I wish there was a more standardized open format for documents. And more people and software should use markdown/.md because you just don’t need anything fancier for most types of documents.

  • @lloram239@feddit.de
    31•1 year ago

    I’d setup a working group to invent something new. Many of our current formats are stuck in the past, e.g. PDF or ODF are still emulating paper, even so everybody keeps reading them on a screen. What I want to see is a standard document format that is build for the modern day Internet, with editing and publishing in mind. HTML ain’t it, as that can’t handle editing well or long form documents, EPUB isn’t supported by browsers, Markdown lacks a lot of features, etc. And than you have things like Google Docs, which are Internet aware, editable, shareable, but also completely proprietary and lock you into the Google ecosystem.

      • @lloram239@feddit.de
        13•1 year ago

        It would solve the long-form document problem. It wouldn’t help with the editing however. The problem with HTML as it is today, is that it has long left it’s document-markup roots and turned into an app development platform, making it not really suitable for plain old documents. You’d need to cut it down to a subset of features that are necessary for documents (e.g. no Javascript), similar to how PDF/A removes features from PDF to create a more reliable and future proof format.

      • @flying_sheep@lemmy.ml
        8•1 year ago

        They’re basically zip files with a standardized metadata file to determine chapter order, index page, … and every chapter is a html file.

      • @lloram239@feddit.de
        2•1 year ago

        That’s the idea, and while at it, we could also make .zip files a proper Web technology with browser support. At the moment ePub exists in this weird twilight where it is build out of mostly Web technology, yet isn’t actually part of the Web. Everything being packed into .zip files also means that you can’t link directly to the individual pages within an ePub, as HTTP doesn’t know how to unpack them. It’s all weird and messy and surprising that nobody has cleaned it all up and integrated it into the Web properly.

        So far the original Microsoft Edge is the only browser I am aware of with native ePub support, but even that didn’t survive when they switched to Chrome’s Bink.

        • @HaggierRapscallier@feddit.nl
          2•1 year ago

          Microsoft Edge’s ePub reader was so good! I would have used it all the time for reading if it hadn’t met its demise. Is there no equivalent fork or project out there? The existing epub readers always have these quirks that annoy me to the point where I’ll just use Calibre’s built in reader which works well enough.

  • @neomis@sh.itjust.works
    30•1 year ago

    Data output from manufacturing equipment. Just pick a standard. JSON works. TOML / YAML if you need to write as you go. Stop creating your own format that’s 80% JSON anyways.

  • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
    28•1 year ago

    I don’t give a shit which debugging format any platform picks, but if they could each pick one that every emulator reads and every compiler emits, that’d be fucking great.

    • @brax@sh.itjust.works
      14•1 year ago

      Even more simpler, I’d really like if we could just unify whether or not $ is needed for variables, and pick # or // for comments. I’m sick of breaking my brain when I flip between languages because of these stupid nuance inconsistencies.

      • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
        5•1 year ago

        Don’t forget ; is a comment in assembly.

        For extra fun, did you know // wasn’t standardized until C99? Comments in K&R C are all /* */. Possibly the most tedious commending format ever devised.

          • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
            3•1 year ago

            Batch files also use REM. Or ::. Each of which causes syntax errors in completely different scenarios.

            M4 says it uses #, but that’s an echo, and dnl is for real comments.

            CSS still forces K&R style, but on reflection, that’s nothing compared to HTML’s ⋖!-- --> nonsense. (Edit: or Lemmy’s idiotic erasure of HTML-like blocks. If they’re not allowed… show them as text, fools.)

              • @mindbleach@sh.itjust.works
                2•1 year ago

                in the appropriate column.

                Alright that’s just hideous.

                Forth uses \, and can do block comments with ( and ), except ) is optional in interpreted mode.

                Algol 60 used ¢. ¢ isn’t even in ASCII, so god knows how that “your two cents” joke ever happened. How can a language this boring still exemplify how all programmers are dorks?

                Visual Basic uses ' because go fuck yourself. QBASIC origins or not, I don’t know how this shipped without at least one meeting where somebody got stabbed. Even the Systems Hungarian heretics should have recoiled in horror.

        • @brax@sh.itjust.works
          2•1 year ago

          /* */ is used in CSS as well, I think.

          Also we’ve got VB (and probably BASIC) out there using ' because why not lol

          [EDIT] I stand corrected by another comment REM is what BASIC uses. DOS batch files use that, too. They’re old though, maybe we give them a pass “it’s okay grampa, let’s get you back to the museum” 🤣 (disclaimer: I am also old, don’t worry)

      • @Spore@lemmy.ml
        2•1 year ago

        It does not work like that. $ is required in shell languages because they have quoteless strings and need to be super concise when calling commands. # and // are valid identifiers in many languages and all of them are well beyond the point of no return. My suggestion is to make use of your editor’s “turn this line into line comment” function and stop remembering them by yourself.

    • @iegod@lemm.ee
      3•1 year ago

      That just sounds impossible given the absolute breadth of all platforms and architectures though.

  • @rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    26•1 year ago

    XML for machine-readable data because I live to cause chaos

    Either markdown or Org for human-readable text-only documents. MS Office formats and the way they are handled have been a mess since the 2007 -x versions were introduced, and those and Open Document formats are way too bloated for when you only want to share a presentable text file.

    While we’re at it, standardize the fucking markdown syntax! I still have nightmares about Reddit’s degenerate four-space-indent code blocks.

    • Agentseed
      18•1 year ago

      Man, I’d love if markdown was more widely used, it’s pretty much the perfect format for everything I do

      • raubarno
        6•1 year ago

        Markdown, CommonMark, .rst formats are good for printing basic rich text for technical documentation and so on, when text styling is made by an external application and you don’t care about reproducible layout.

        But you also want to make custom styles (font size, text alignment, colours), page layout (paper format, margin size, etc.) and make sure your document is reproducible across multiple processing applications, that the layout doesn’t break, authoring tools, maybe even some version control, etc. This is when it strikes you bad.

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

        Markdown misses checkboxes anywhere, especially in tables.

        But markdown is just good. It’s just writing text as normal basically

      • @tal@lemmy.today
        1•1 year ago

        You can convert Markdown to a number of formats with pandoc, if you want to author in Markdown and just distribute in some other format.

        Not going to work if you need to collaborate with other people, though.