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@jonippolito@digipres.club
2025-03-13 13:23:38

AI won’t save PDF from itself. PDFs are largely inaccessible, proprietary, and a nightmare for data extraction (ever tried copy-pasting a two-column doc?). Mistral’s new tool still struggles to convert them cleanly; imagine misreading a PDF drug chart and prescribing a 500mg overdose instead of 50mg. Science is about reusing knowledge, so it's high time we used formats that make it easy to extract data—rather than consign it to a tomb

An image of an archeologist discovering a tomb filled with PDF icons.

#archives #collections #data #digitalcuration #digitization… | Jon Ippolito
Can AI save PDF from itself? Probably not, so stop using PDF to archive your documents. PDFs are not easily accessible, hide their dependencies and security vulnerabilities, and rely on a 700-page spec developed by a proprietary vendor rather than an open standards body. Most importantly, they're a bitch to extract data from. (Have you tried copy-pasting text from a two-column PDF?) Along with bitmapped PDFs that are basically images, there are even searchable PDFs whose creators have acciden…