Anyone familiar with the history of how PDFs became such a widespread format in the first place? I get that it looks nice but not being able to edit it by default just seems weird to me.
The “read only” nature of PDFs is a feature, not a bug. The idea being that once you distribute the PDF, it can’t be changed, and thus has more “truth” than something editable would. Even now PDF is considered an acceptable format for legal documents where Word docx is not. Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs.
> Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs.
Well, unless you sign the PDF. Even more, you can sign each edit separately, so you can do things like add content and signatures and still verify who added what. Meaning: one party can create PDF with forms, sign it, then the party filling out the form can sign their own changes for authentication.
And let's not forget the fact that PDF renders correctly on pretty much any machine you put it on - this is incredibly important.
> Of course this is completely false safety given that many programs can edit PDFs.
But can you edit a properly signed[1] PDF without breaking it? From an integrity perspective, that's what matters; otherwise, it's just inherently more portable until non-repudiation becomes relevant.
PDF is a high-quality vector format that displays the same on every device, can be produced by many different applications but use the same viewer, and has a public specification that's an ISO standard. There's very little competition. Compressed PostScript is clunky, slow, and still big, XPS was too late, DJVU is primarily for scans. Things like Word or HTML display differently on different devices, Word and many other formats are or were proprietary.
