Towards a Universally Editable Portable Document Format

PDF is the established format for the exchange of final-form print-oriented documents on the Web, and for a good reason: it is the only format that guarantees the preservation of layout across different platforms, systems and viewing devices. Its main disadvantage, however, is that a document, once converted to PDF, is very difficult to edit. As of today (2018), there is still no universal format for the exchange of editable formatted text documents on the Web; users can only exchange the application's source files, which do not benefit from the robustness and portability of PDF.

This position paper describes how we can engineer such an editable format based on some of the principles of PDF. We begin by analysing the current status quo, and provide a summary of current approaches for editing existing PDFs, other relevant document formats, and ways to embed the document's structure into the PDF itself. We then ask ourselves what it really means for a formatted document to be editable, and discuss the related problem of enabling WYSIWYG direct manipulation even in cases where layout is usually computed or optimized using offline or batch methods (as is common with long-form documents).

After defining our goals, we propose a framework for creating such editable portable documents and present a prototype tool that demonstrates our initial steps and serves as a proof of concept. We conclude by providing a roadmap for future work.