Parsing a PDF file

[Richard Gaskin]

Paul Dupuis wrote:

 > In truth a NEW portable document format needs to be invented that
 > connects and preserves content to its appearance, but I suspect that
 > people who want to keep both intact and portable are just using HTML5
 > and CSS3.

CSS is a wonderful solution.

Being prone to idealism, I like to believe (admittedly in the absence of 
all current evidence) that we're only a few years away from the nearly 
complete abandonment of PDF as a popular format for everything except 
perhaps the subset of documents that truly must remain in form that 
emulates yesteryear's printed page, an ever-shrinking use-case.

For everything else, content in HTML with formatting in CSS is a 
wonderful option.

Better still might be for the world to adopt LiveCode stacks as a 
universal document format.  For more programmer-accessible and 
feature-rich than PDF, and fully open source.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Fourth World Systems
  Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
  ____________________________________________________________________
  Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com