if you could pick a standard format for a purpose what would it be and why?

e.g. flac for lossless audio because…

(yes you can add new categories)

summary:

  1. photos .jxl
  2. videos .av1 (someone mentioned mka or something like that, cant recall but thet mentiomed it being a ‘container’)
  3. daw session files .dawproject
  4. documents .odt
  5. archive files (this one is causing a bloodbath so i picked randomly) .tar.zst
  6. models .gltf / .glb
  7. plain text utf-8
  8. interchange format .ora
  9. configuration files toml OR yaml (disagreement)
  10. typesetting typst
  11. open domain image data .exr
  12. lossless audio .flac
  13. lossy audio .opus
  14. subtitles srt/ass
  15. container mkv
  • DogMuffins@discuss.tchncs.de
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    9 months ago

    No, although there’s probably a culture or convention around that.

    Originally the idea was that it’s a format which can contain fonts and other things so it will be rendered the same way on different devices even if those devices don’t have those fonts installed. The only reason it’s not commonly editable that I’m aware of is that it’s a fairly arcane proprietary spec.

    Now we have the openspec odt which can embed all the things, so pdf editing just doesn’t really seem to have any support.

    The established conventions around pdfs do kind of amaze me. Like contracts get emailed for printing & signing all the time. In many cases it would be trivial to edit the pdf and return your edited copy which the author is unlikely to ever read.