[scribus-dev] Fwd: Great meeting you in Saarbrücken

[Andreas Vox]

Hi Tamir

...
>
> For the benefit of everyone else on this list, when Leonard and I spoke
> at PDF Days 2018 in Berlin, I proposed the idea of extending the PDF
> spec to support the embedding of sufficient metadata that would make it
> possible to edit the document in some sort of "standardized" way. We
> would then finally have a way to exchange editable documents with others
> with robust layout and the other features of PDF - no other format
> offers this.
>
> Obviously, most applications have their own proprietary format and their
> own internal models of the document structure. But there are very many
> similarities among the various canvas-based document formats and, just
> like PDF is a common standard for final form documents now, wouldn't it
> be great if there were a common standard for editable documents too?
> ...


I think it's only possible to achieve two of the following: editable,
stable layout and optimal layout. If you modify a document in another
application than the one which produced it, there will always be difference
in appearance, functionality or both.

But there's definitely a lot of opportunity to improve editing PDF if you
accept adequate layout changes. IMHO, reflow, font substitution, change of
color model, change of resolution and scaling are acceptable layout
changes. Missing content, inconsistent line breaking or distortion are
obviously not acceptable.

A first step would be to preserve style information for stories. Using
marked content to preserve an XML-like structure and storing CSS styles as
page piece dictionaries should achieve similar results as interoperability
between word processors.
Layout programs like Scribus do not only use margins and columns, but also
have master/template pages, layers and text flowing around images.
Providing a standard for that will be much more challenging.
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