On Having Realistic Expectations
As a quick look at the history of PDF and its internal structure reveals, PDF is not an editing format. PDF was designed to be a delivery format intended, ultimately, for the eyes of human readers.
Although the format has over time developed features that make machine parsing, analysis, and even editing more practical, at their core, PDF files are designed primarily to maintain their look across a wide range of devices: they are meant to be exact visual representations of printed pages, and almost everything about them is designed to make that representation more exact and efficient. Any information within the PDF specification that enhances editing was added as an afterthought and was not one of the original goals ...
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