That's Adobe. Look at their other formats, and PDF seems to be one of their better ones. Compare to SWF, PSD, AI and so on.
PDF is the successor of PostScript. PostScript is a stack-based programming language where anything can happen, while PDF enforces some document structure and metadata structure on top of it, so you can e.g. at least determine where pagebreaks are, without having to interpret ("run the code of") the whole document.
Still, PDF is simpler than PostScript in the same sense that XML is a simplification of SGML. Jumping from PDF to a well-designed format would be like jumping from XML to JSON or S-Expr.
Comments
That's Adobe. Look at their other formats, and PDF seems to be one of their better ones. Compare to SWF, PSD, AI and so on.
PDF is the successor of PostScript. PostScript is a stack-based programming language where anything can happen, while PDF enforces some document structure and metadata structure on top of it, so you can e.g. at least determine where pagebreaks are, without having to interpret ("run the code of") the whole document.
Still, PDF is simpler than PostScript in the same sense that XML is a simplification of SGML. Jumping from PDF to a well-designed format would be like jumping from XML to JSON or S-Expr.