|Rants||By Shamus||Sep 15, 2006||3 comments|
A long time ago I gave an example of how people use PDFs when they shouldn’t. Later I followed up with a bit about how Adobe Acrobat is a grotesque resource hog that makes Jabba the Hutt look like Jenny Craig. Now to complete the trilogy we have this slashdot story about various security flaws within either PDF files or Acrobat. Like so many Slashdot stories, it has these frustrating gaps in the piece so that the users can read the whole thing and still come away with enough diverging interpretations to get a really good flame war rolling. A key quote:
Ok, so is this a fundamental flaw in the design of PDFs or poor implementation on the part of Adobe? By saying “features supported by the product” it leaves open the view that PDFs are inherently flawed and Adobe just followed the spec. I doubt this, but the story isn’t clear enough.
Either way, it sucks and does little to improve my opinion of the PDF format. There are a very small slice of people who need it and use it well, and an army of imbeciles who misuse the thing on a grand scale.