The structure of the specification is gigantic, lengthy, and wrong-headed on many points. It’s a file format but it tries to define details of how it should be viewed (!!!). It is bloated and inefficient. It moves things away from becoming efficient data—plain text becomes formatted or even a flat picture of words.
Like what? FYI, PDF hasn’t been proprietary since 2008, and there are plenty of free/open source implementations of it.
The structure of the specification is gigantic, lengthy, and wrong-headed on many points. It’s a file format but it tries to define details of how it should be viewed (!!!). It is bloated and inefficient. It moves things away from becoming efficient data—plain text becomes formatted or even a flat picture of words.
As an illustration of how messed up the spec is, even Adobe Photoshop commonly fails to render PDFs the same way as Adobe Acrobat.