<story><title>Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word</title><url>https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/paul-manafort-couldnt-convert-pdfs-to-word-documents.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freehunter</author><text>There are certain things I cannot believe are still this difficult with as advanced as user-friendly technology is: sending files to someone else, and converting documents.&lt;p&gt;Sending files to someone else is a problem with a ton of solutions, some of them better than others, but none of them actually solving the problem. Email often has size limits and spam filters block certain attachments. Dropbox is often restricted at most workplaces, and not everyone uses it. It also has size restrictions. USB is the most reliable, but then you get into the whole &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s NTFS formatted which doesn&amp;#x27;t work on my Linux machine&amp;quot; or it&amp;#x27;s HFS and I need to use it on Windows&amp;quot; nonsense, plus sending it longer distances takes days through the mail.&lt;p&gt;But converting documents... guys it&amp;#x27;s just electricity running through fancy sand. It shouldn&amp;#x27;t be that hard. I work on software where I&amp;#x27;m often connected to a jump server without Office installed on it, and the software expects me to open a spreadsheet for troubleshooting. I was doing some audio recording recently and the hoops I had to jump through to save it as MP3 weren&amp;#x27;t insurmountable, but still pretty annoying.&lt;p&gt;And don&amp;#x27;t get me started on the Office 2003 spreadsheet that makes me boot up my Windows XP VM to open because the macros won&amp;#x27;t work on Office 2017. Or when I need to use Visio but there&amp;#x27;s no Mac version so I have to open my VM too.&lt;p&gt;And the web just makes it worse... no more software incompatibilities because when software isn&amp;#x27;t supported anymore, we just shut the servers down and everything is gone forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>herodotus</author><text>Actually, converting PDF to a file format is very non-trivial. The problem is that the PDF typically retains none of the semantic structure of the original file. Yes, I know there are converters to Word, none of which are perfect, but in each case the people who wrote the converters had to do a lot of work. PDF is all about geometry. So even the characters in a word do not have to be together in the PDF content stream. (I worked extensively on semantic reconstruction of PDF documents before I retired.)</text></comment>
<story><title>Manafort Left an Incriminating Paper Trail Converting PDFs to Word</title><url>https://slate.com/technology/2018/02/paul-manafort-couldnt-convert-pdfs-to-word-documents.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>freehunter</author><text>There are certain things I cannot believe are still this difficult with as advanced as user-friendly technology is: sending files to someone else, and converting documents.&lt;p&gt;Sending files to someone else is a problem with a ton of solutions, some of them better than others, but none of them actually solving the problem. Email often has size limits and spam filters block certain attachments. Dropbox is often restricted at most workplaces, and not everyone uses it. It also has size restrictions. USB is the most reliable, but then you get into the whole &amp;quot;it&amp;#x27;s NTFS formatted which doesn&amp;#x27;t work on my Linux machine&amp;quot; or it&amp;#x27;s HFS and I need to use it on Windows&amp;quot; nonsense, plus sending it longer distances takes days through the mail.&lt;p&gt;But converting documents... guys it&amp;#x27;s just electricity running through fancy sand. It shouldn&amp;#x27;t be that hard. I work on software where I&amp;#x27;m often connected to a jump server without Office installed on it, and the software expects me to open a spreadsheet for troubleshooting. I was doing some audio recording recently and the hoops I had to jump through to save it as MP3 weren&amp;#x27;t insurmountable, but still pretty annoying.&lt;p&gt;And don&amp;#x27;t get me started on the Office 2003 spreadsheet that makes me boot up my Windows XP VM to open because the macros won&amp;#x27;t work on Office 2017. Or when I need to use Visio but there&amp;#x27;s no Mac version so I have to open my VM too.&lt;p&gt;And the web just makes it worse... no more software incompatibilities because when software isn&amp;#x27;t supported anymore, we just shut the servers down and everything is gone forever.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>pjc50</author><text>Document incompatibility is an entire industry. If you could convert Office documents easily, you wouldn&amp;#x27;t need so many office licenses.</text></comment>