https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=85209
Bug ID: 85209
Summary: Adoption idea: make Hybrid PDF format a saveable
format for Writer, Impress and Draw
Product: LibreOffice
Version: unspecified
Hardware: Other
OS: All
Status: UNCONFIRMED
Severity: normal
Priority: medium
Component: UI
Assignee: [email protected]
Reporter: [email protected]
I would like to take another stab at the idea of hybrid PDFs as a saveable
document format as a way to increase adoption of the ODF file format. I've read
bug 79811, but the tone of the discussion left a bad taste in my mouth, so I'd
rather start with a clean slate.
A hybrid PDF is a delightfully subversive format. It enhances PDFs in such a
way that they become better editable. But they are still PDFs, which are
universally supported for viewing. Libreoffice has some basic support for
editing normal PDFs. This is nice for people who want to change some text in a
PDF without using proprietary tools. Now, saving a document as a PDF in Writer
with the hybrid option turned on gives the PDF additional structure so you can
use Libreoffice's more powerful editing features. If you don't know what kind
of PDF you're dealing with, opening a PDF either gives you simple editing
capabilities, or the full power. Either way, it's better just viewing the file.
You can see how a hybrid PDF format could be used to flood the market with ODF
documents and LibreOffice: any LibreOffice user who wants to create a PDF can
just save the document as a PDF, which would by default be fully editable by
LibreOffice. This has a number of advantages over plain ODF or plain PDF:
* everybody and their dog can read your document
* the PDF has much better structure if you want to edit it
* LibreOffice has best-in-class editing support for PDFs
That last point is important: LibreOffice will become known for being the best
option for editing PDFs, certainly in the open source world and maybe even
considering the proprietary alternatives, precisely because you can leverage
all existing editing features of LibreOffice.
Then the delightfully subversive part comes into play: everybody who starts
using LibreOffice to create PDFs that are better editable also wittingly or
unwittingly starts spreading the ODF format. Soon, there will be market
pressure for other PDF authoring programs to add ODF editing capabilities. Here
I think it would become useful to join the PDF standardization effort, because
"editable PDF's through ODF payload" can become an actual standard. This
standardization process could for example alleviate the duplication of data
that is inherent with the current hybrid PDF format.
Scope:
I think hybrid PDFs only make sense for Writer, Impress and Draw, as those
kinds of documents are often consumed in a read-only way. It doesn't really
make sense to create PDfs of spreadsheets or databases because their use lies
in modification.
When everything fails:
The aforementioned scenario is a utopic course of events. Let's say that hybrid
PDFs are not that successful and they don't actually replace standard PDFs at
all. In this case, what remains is that users of LibreOffice have an easy and
powerful way to create editable PDFs as part of their daily workflow and they
can use them to do normal work. That's a win.
Downsides:
The other bug report uncovered some technical difficulties such as it being
quite some work to move the functionality from Export to Save, it being slow to
open, and increased filesize of each document. I don't think any of these are
unsolvable, but it does make it less attractive as the default format for sure.
Another concern that was raised was that users might expect other software to
also be able to save these editable PDFs when they actually can't, thereby
losing the user's work. Of course causing data loss is a big no-no, but I don't
think it is LibreOffice's responsibility when other productivity suites fail to
meet the expectations of their users. The solution is clear: other software
suites should also support PDFs with ODF payload.
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