despitegirls t1_iwjt8m8 wrote
Reply to comment by AtraMikaDelia in Digital Books wear out faster than Physical Books - Internet Archive Blogs by koavf
Every OS easily natively reads plaintext. It's a pain to read a lot of it, but it can be done, and manually marked up for better readability and functionality. I'm sure in the future there'll be an AI-based tool that could look at a text document and suggest possible formatting, if there isn't already.
PDF is an open format but isn't supported natively by every OS (specifically smaller versions of Linux). There's also more CPU and RAM necessary to display fonts and formatting than a plain text file. Not something we really have to worry about these days but worth considering when resources are more precious.
AtraMikaDelia t1_iwjvd0q wrote
>Every OS easily natively reads plaintext. It's a pain to read a lot of it, but it can be done, and manually marked up for better readability and functionality.
The Operating System is not what you're going to use to read a text file. The operating system will run an application that can read text files, but the operating system itself doesn't do that. And if there are any operating systems which are incapable of opening a pdf, then really that's on them for being poorly designed. Every Linux distro I've seen has been more than capable of launching programs that can read pdfs, and I'm struggling to think of how an OS that couldn't even launch a modern web browser would be useful for literally anything outside of incredibly specialized uses.
CPU/Ram aren't even a concern, you might experience slightly longer loading times when trying to pull up the document, but ultimately that's a non-issue that is more than offset by how much easier a pdf is to read.
Additionally, if you tried to use an AI to reformat your .txt file into something more legible, you would have to save it as something other than a .txt, because a .txt by itself cannot store anything but plaintext. And if you do that you're right back at square 1 with plaintext no longer being the ideal format. Also it would require a significant amount of processing power to run the AI.
koavf OP t1_iwjz4ag wrote
> And if there are any operating systems which are incapable of opening a pdf, then really that's on them for being poorly designed.
The goal of an operating system is not to read PDFs. As several others have pointed out to you, you could have a plain text file (with the proper encoding) that could be read on a computer that is decades old and it will be readable on one that is made decades from now. You don't know that is true of PDF.
despitegirls t1_iwk4410 wrote
You mention that the OS isn't reading a text file (correct), but not that Linux isn't an OS as I inferred. Missed opportunity for further pedantry there. /s
Realistically, if we were archiving documents we'd do so in multiple formats. PDF or some other format would likely be the most used but plain text would be there for compatibility, or for those who are accessing files on more limited clients.
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