Converting pdfs

[Paul Sladen]

On Thu, 25 Oct 2012, rikona wrote:
> I have a ton of stuff stored in pdf format that will need to be
> accessed for many years to come.

PDF is the best structured container format available right now, and
has been for the last 10-15 years; even if the archiving and print
industries were initially slow to adopt it.

> With Adobe dropping some linux support, is this a significant
> risk?

Adobe's reader software is one of the worst things about the PDF
experience for regular users.  Mac OSX, Ubuntu, iOS and Android all
come with faster and easier (non-Adobe) PDF readers built-in.

> Is there a way to convert pdfs to another format, **reliably**, so
> I can start to convert docs to a more accessible long-term format?

PDF is that format you want.  It's a text-based format that you can
open in Emacs if you need to;  which you can send to any PostScript3
printer if you need to;  and which you can render natively using
several options including Mac OSX' Quatz2D (display PDF), or
libpoppler on Ubuntu, or Mupdf, or several other choices.

Don't change anything, except your PDF reader software,

	-Paul