Simon Willison’s Weblog

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2 items tagged “opengovernment”

2009

Adobe is Bad for Open Government. The problem isn’t just that PDFs are a bad way of sharing data, it’s that Adobe have been actively lobbying the US government to use their PDF and Flash formats for open government initiatives.

# 1st November 2009, 12:51 pm / opengovernment, adobe, flash, pdf, sunlightfoundation

No PDFs! The Sunlight Foundation point out that PDFs are a terrible way of implementing “more transparent government” due to their general lack of structure. At the Guardian (and I’m sure at other newspapers) we waste an absurd amount of time manually extracting data from PDF files and turning it in to something more useful. Even CSV is significantly more useful for many types of information.

# 1st November 2009, 12:04 pm / opengovernment, sunlightfoundation, adobe, csv, open-data, pdf