PDF Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later (nngroup.com) 227
Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they're still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them. They're unpleasant to read and navigate and remain unfit for digital-content display. From a report: [...] Burying information in PDFs means that most people won't read it. Participants in several of our recent usability studies on corporate websites and intranets did not appreciate PDFs and skipped right over them. They complained woefully whenever they encountered PDF files and many who opened PDFs quickly abandoned them. Following are behaviors and quotes from business professionals testing the About Us areas of corporate websites. One user looking for information on the Small Business Administration's website got stuck in a PDF. While she was trying to figure out what exactly the administration did, she said, "I expect it to talk more about what they can do for me. If the print was bigger, that would be really helpful. Now, I'm stuck in a PDF."
Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
... more a condemnation of poor use of PDFs.
Indeed. PDF isn't a great choice for on-screen reading, but if you know what you're doing, and take the medium's characteristics into account, it's perfectly acceptable.
But PDF is really better suited for something that will be printed, that the author doesn't want easily alterable, especially if you don't know what OS it will be printed from. For distributing cross-platform documents to be printed, it's actually pretty good.
But formatting something to be printed, and then expecting people to read it on screen, is pretty much the definition of bad a choice.
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But formatting something to be printed, and then expecting people to read it on screen, is pretty much the definition of bad a choice.
You might even say it's a PDFal choice...
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
... more a condemnation of poor use of PDFs.
Indeed. PDF isn't a great choice for on-screen reading, but if you know what you're doing, and take the medium's characteristics into account, it's perfectly acceptable.
But PDF is really better suited for something that will be printed, that the author doesn't want easily alterable, especially if you don't know what OS it will be printed from. For distributing cross-platform documents to be printed, it's actually pretty good.
But formatting something to be printed, and then expecting people to read it on screen, is pretty much the definition of bad a choice.
PDFs are also great for reading content on a tablet. It makes it easy to carry around a lot of documentation and ensures the formatting stays in place.
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
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>tablet usage
Maybe, but in nearly every case, epub is a better solution for this.
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>tablet usage
Maybe, but in nearly every case, epub is a better solution for this.
How? What are its advantages over pdfs?
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:4)
Re: Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:3)
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PDF is PostScript (the printer language), zipped (Score:5, Informative)
> But PDF is really better suited for something that will be printed ...
> But formatting something to be printed, and then expecting people to read it on screen, is pretty much the definition of bad a choice.
Absolutely, and of course.
PostScript is a language that computers use to talk to printers. To create PDF, v1, Adobe took PostScript, deleted some scripting, and specified that the resulting PostScript file should be zipped and renamed with a .PDF extension. PDF is, at its heart, PostScript - the language for controlling printers.
PDF version 2.0 has some changes, but it's still basically PostScript. It's a file for sending to a printer.
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Yeah it's a shame there is no cross-platform document format that can be viewed on both screen and print with different styling. They should think of adding that to the web.
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
PDFs are a great choice for on-screen reading. They present data in a fixed format that supports annotation. They're designed for reference material such as manuals, scientific papers and books.
They are not a good choice for your "About Us" web page, because they're not a web page.
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Not particularly, precisely because the formatting isn't easily changeable by the user. When you format a PDF, you make assumptions about what kind of device it will be read on, and those assumptions will never be universally correct. What works well on an 11" table won't work for crap on a smart phone. What works on a smart phone won't work for crap on a laptop or a desktop. To say nothing of users with particular needs, like poor eyesight and a need to enlarge the text, or a need to adjust colors for cont
Corollary (Score:5, Insightful)
The corollary to that is, don't make something a web page if someone is going to want to download a local copy of it.
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Re: Corollary (Score:2)
A zip file with a couple html, css and image files etc works just fine for things like user manuals, and tends to be much less resource intensive than Adobe's latest and greatest batch of bloatware. I'd much prefer that for things that don't need to be formatted for printing, or specifically formatted for display.
You can even read it with lynx. Nice.
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Exactly.
PDFs are great for when you want to be absolutely sure what a printed copy looks like, eg. you're sending something to someone for them to sign like a contract.
PDFs are also decent for online versions of books as long as they're optimized for searching - though I do prefer the feel of paper between my fingers and the ease of flipping through a book to find what I'm looking for.
PDFs are not good for most other things.
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I'm sorry, I was referencing some PDF versions of D&D Monster Manuals, in which placement of graphics, tables etc. are very important. I didn't mean fiction books. ... And that sounds like I'm saying monster manuals aren't fiction. I hope you know what I actually mean.
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PDF's are not good for online reading of books (or other docs), because you can't adjust font size and page formatting for different size screens. Reading a 5 x7 or larger (or, in some cases even smaller) page on a phone is a pita.
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I think there are a bunch of issues with PDF other than just misuse.
1. Adobe Stranglehold on the platform for a long time. For a long time, you needed Acrobat Reader just to view a PDF, and if you wanted to save in that format, you needed to pay Adobe big bucks to use the format. (Yes there were some free software that worked just as well, however if you are in a business, you probably wanted something official). So a lot of end users, will not bother with trying a PDF, as it would be hit or miss they ca
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think there are a bunch of issues with PDF other than just misuse.
1. Adobe Stranglehold on the platform for a long time. For a long time, you needed Acrobat Reader just to view a PDF, and if you wanted to save in that format, you needed to pay Adobe big bucks to use the format. (Yes there were some free software that worked just as well, however if you are in a business, you probably wanted something official). So a lot of end users, will not bother with trying a PDF, as it would be hit or miss they can view it.
2. Loading Time. Opening the PDF viewer often takes a long time, and not worth the effort.
3. A new UI. Even with integrated PDF Views, it seems the UI in PDF land follows different rules.
4. Too easy to create. If you have PDF writing capabilities. Normally each person will make and publish their PDFs without Ediors, or too much concern about presentation.
5. Convert to different platforms. They save data in a grid format. Just try to copy and paste that data into a Spreadsheet. Nuff said.
6. The PDF File that is a scanned Photocopy of a received fax. It is just an other case that people don't care about how presentable their work is
7. Too much like old paper. We have the data presented in a 8 1/2" * 11" format on our 1920 * 1080 pixel display.
8. Not easily editable. Needing custom PDF software, that is clunky to use to do some simple edits. Normally you use the original format data to fix it. If I have a document on a computer, I may want to edit, notate the document electronically.
9. Needlessly large file sizes. Having the perfect font, and size, handling for scans and impurities, Makes these documents much larger to transfer then what may be needed.
10. They download to your PC, where you need to delete them later. If I am on the Web, I want to see the document, but I don't want to keep it on my PC.
Wow, so much wrong with this....
1. Adobe isn't your only alternative to viewing PDFs. Chrome and Edge can read them just fine. There are lots of third party viewers, with great features
2. Loading time? I guess if you are viewing on a 4GB PC circa 2005 on a platter drive... it blinks up for me in a number of readers
3. Which UI? The one in Chrome? Edge? Third party readers? See #1
4. Too easy to create? What? Page layout is an art form... unless you are simply talking about scanning and making a PDF of images, which isn't really the point of PDF. It's a rather lazy way to compose a document. Still, it's the same for CBR/CBZ comic books.
5. Converting to other platforms isn't the point of PDF, but I'll bite... I have written apps to create CBR files out of PDFs. Some readers can OCR the text and extract that - but if you are using PDF to read dense text pages that don't require layouts, you are certainly using the wrong format.
6. This point makes no sense. PDFs from scans are the simplest form, and mostly used to send documentation to others without upsetting the formatting.
7. The whole point of PDF is for PAGE LAYOUT. It was created to PUBLISH ON PAPER. That doesn't make it any less useful in a pure digital environment (see below)
8. PDFs are not intended to be edited, but there are FORMS.... and those, if handled by the reader properly, work great. Many readers also let you put in text and graphics over top of the original page just fine, if you wanted to make notes or something. The whole point of the format is to preserve the integrity of the page design.
9. Large files are the fault of the creator, not the format. Again, I have written tools to reduce the size of images used as PDF pages into more reasonable chunks. Magazines distributed in PDF formats can have wildly differing sizes for the same issue, depending on the source of those PDFs. For print, images tend to be very large, to preserve the quality.
10. I have a lot of PDFs on my PC. Books, magazines... they save me the hassle of having stacks of books and magazines on my shelves, and even better, they are backed up and always AVA
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Wow, so much wrong with this....
1. Adobe isn't your only alternative to viewing PDFs.
Chrome and Edge can read them just fine. There are lots of third party viewers, with great features
Wait I thought that specific post was dealing with the past, as in, how it used to be - and thus how it is now, and the catching up that happened isn't relevant except in the sense of it taking too long for the playing field to properly become competitive...? Perhaps I missed something though.
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Adobe Stranglehold on the platform for a long time. For a long time, you needed Acrobat Reader just to view a PDF,
It was Windows that required users to download that miserable free-and-worth-every-penny Acrobat Reader that had to be updated every time you viewed a document with it. That other popular operating system has a PDF reader built right into it that even gives you limited editing editing powers: delete unneeded pages, combine PDFs, and annotate them. If you want to do that in Acrobat, you have to buy the fancy Pro version.
Re:Not really a condemnation of PDFs, but... (Score:4, Informative)
That's only by coincidence. Apple/NeXT had a PostScript-based UI, so it was a practically free thing to add.
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Any technology, sufficiently advanced, ... (Score:4, Insightful)
Will still confuse idiots.
Font size issues? Try a viewer that allows zooming.
Granted, a PDF made up of scanned pages is no more readable than a DOC file made up of scanned images. And there are other formats that allow things to "flow" to fit the display device.
But PDFs are not unusable just because there are some put together by idiots.
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Re:Any technology, sufficiently advanced, ... (Score:5, Insightful)
Zooming doesn't help if the paragraphs become too wide to view a whole line at a reasonable font size. Web pages can be reflowed as the font size increases, PDFs can't.
Incidentally that's why Firefox for mobile is unusable on many sites: you can to constantly scroll left to right to read them.
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this. i'd mark it up if i could. replacing the problem of small font with the problem of tedious scrollbars is not a good option.
Re:Any technology, sufficiently advanced, ... (Score:5, Informative)
If the font is unbearably small, blame the author not the format.
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it always looks the same. Everywhere. Regardless of medium. Regardless of zoom size. On screens. On paper.
That's what's attractive to designers rooted in pre-phone/tablet thinking who learned their craft in QuarkXPress and print production. It gives them absolute design control.
Now we live in the 'responsive design' world that's moved on from 1970's Swiss design based on the grid. The old-school pre-phone rules of readability have been replaced by dynamic rules, based on the kind of 'browser detection' responsive CSS design thinking used on the web. Rigid PDF formatting works against variable screen ratio, s
Re:Any technology, sufficiently advanced, ... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Zooming doesn't help if the paragraphs become too wide to view a whole line at a reasonable font size.
You know phones can be held sideways, right?
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I would hate if for instance chip documentation ceased to be PDF. I don't want to be on a 400+ page *webpage* for documentation for that PDF is actually VASTLY superior.
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You're assuming people are smart enough to realize you can zoom a pdf.
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Those f-ing designers and their lovely 'design-ery' whitespace borders to give their PDFs a clean appearance. Just give me the text and a little bit for my documention.
I'll take them ANY time over a paper manual (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:I'll take them ANY time over a paper manual (Score:5, Insightful)
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I agree, it is often easier to find information in a well constructed PDF than having to navigate through an HTML page hierarchy that does not have search support.
And that's the problem, most PDFs are not well constructed. And that is primarily because the folks making them are relying on Word to produce the PDF.
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The ones I use are.
Semiconductor datasheets use PDFs as they were intended.
Searchable, mixed text and graphics, formulas, clickable indexes.
It all works great.
But then again, they're not put together by clowns.
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The ones I use are.
Semiconductor datasheets use PDFs as they were intended.
Searchable, mixed text and graphics, formulas, clickable indexes.
It all works great.
But then again, they're not put together by clowns.
Aren't you blessed. I receive upwards of 200 PDFs a month. Most of them do not have any clickable links, as they don't even have chapter or section heading. And the ones that do have clickable links .. the links are pointing to a reference outside of the PDF, typically a website or better yet an internal sharepoint item ( once in blue moon, I get one pointing to an accessible document in Dropbox or it type service).
PDFs put together by engineers and scientists are usually the notable exception to th
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Do you think HTML would be a better solution? It seems to me all the things you've complained about in a PDF would be at least as bad in HTML.
Last I checked, word created *terrible* HTML documents, you can certainly put a sharepoint link in one, and you can't even embed images, only links to them, which means you either have to put everything on the web (yeah right) or send along a whole directory full of files.
If you've got clowns making documents, those documents are pretty much going to be shite no matte
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How can a HTML page hierarchy not have search support? Use "grep".
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That's assuming the PDF you opened actually isn't just a scanned paper manual.
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I agree, it is often easier to find information in a well constructed PDF than having to navigate through an HTML page hierarchy that does not have search support.
All latest-version product manuals are PDFs now, often superseding the printed one that comes in the box with your new product. If you get a free iOS app called Readdle Documents, you can create a live index to a PDF that you can conveniently carry around on your phone. Using this makes it actually practical to jump right to that obscure, deeply buried menu setting you need on your new Nikon while shooting in the field.
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I use them DAILY! Easier to find what you want without having to flip through pages and pages of manuals.
The irony being that PDFs are intended to be printed out and not read on your screen. But I think everybody agrees with you it's nice to have the option either way.
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My manuals have numbered pages. And unlike a PDF, page 22 really is page 22, not page 8.
PDFs are good for archiving, I suppose.
And proper word wrapping is a thing. I don't want to read a picture. I want to read text that formats properly when zooming
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Manuals usually have page 22 labelled as page 8. The difference is the "front matter." You don't notice because you're flipping through the manual looking for page 8 and not counting pages to get there.
Most PDF readers will display the actual page number (as in, the first page is 1) because computers are pretty good at counting. You can use this number, which is admittedly a bit awkward, or you can use the page numbers printed on the page, just like you would in your printed copy. OR, if the PDF is made pro
Re:I'll take them ANY time over a paper manual (Score:4, Informative)
Random book I picked off my shelf, Zar's Biostatistical Analysis, Third ed.
- Pages 1 and 2 are completely unnumbered, a listing of statistical tables for quick reference.
- Page 3 has the title, author, publisher info. Fourth is copyright info.
- Page 5 through 10 is the table of contents, labelled iii through viii.
- Page 11 and 12 is the preface, labelled ix and x.
- Page 13 is the first page of the actual text. It is labelled page 1, and is referred to as page 1 in the table of contents.
I don't think I have any actual printed manuals around, but my (printed) copy of the 2011 Nautical Almanac (Commercial Edition) from the UK Hydrographic Office has
- Page 1 and 2, ads
- 3, 4, 5, altitude correction talbes
- Page 6 cover page
- Page 7 copyright (labelled ii)
- Page 8 TOC (labelled iii)
- Page 9, first page of regular content (a listing of notable days and phases of the moon), labelled page 4.
First hit on my computer searching for "manual", I've got a PDF manual for EAGLE (version 7, 5th ed.):
- Page 1, cover
- Page 2, copyright and contact info
- Page 3-18, TOC (labelled page 3-18)
- Page 19, Chapter 1, Introduction (labelled page 19)
So only the PDF actually has the physical pages and the page number labels aligned. The custom of numbering the pages excluding front matter is kind of an old-timey habit that's probably more trouble than it's worth, but it doesn't seem to have anything to do with the PDF format.
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The opposite is true (Score:5, Insightful)
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Clearly the problem is that the web pages need to be more "Mobile friendly" and support features like one item per screen and continuous loading.
That will fix everything and make PDFs obsolete and we will sing their praises ...or so my UX/UI design teams tells me...
Mobile sites (Score:3)
I'll take a PDF over slashdots mobile website any day. It's a lot easier to simply zoom or search in a PDF than it is to unbreak these helpful 'improvements' for mobile users.
Pros and Cons of PDF (Score:5, Informative)
I have a 4K monitor in portrait mode. Makes it real easy to view a PDF in a browser with the window maximized (Windows+Up Arror) or even fullscreen (F11) and I can use Ctrl + and Ctrl - to make the font as big (or as small) as I want.
I'd rather have a PDF then some website that disappears after X years.
Pros of PDF
* Looks great on a monitor in portrait mode
* Can adjust font size and page remains
* Can search for the filename if the PDF is popular
* Can search the web for the Title of the whitepaper
* Can usually search text
* Can view natively in Chrome & Firefox.
* Can combine multiple PDFs into a single document
* Generally WYSIWYG when printing
* Can be encrypted with a password (both pro and con)
* Ubiquitous
Cons of PDF
* Requires a 2nd monitor in portrait since using on a single monitor is horribly inefficient
* Can run into problems with PDF forms
* Fonts can look like horrible (LaTex or PostScript conversion?)
* Hard to edit without special tools -- say customize styles compared to CSS
* Requires yet another app to view
* Browsers do the bare minimum for viewing
* Can't do diffs on them to see what changed
* Copy-paste can get broken words if badly typeset
* Can be encrypted with a password (both pro and con)
* Was yet-another-proprietary format.
Re: "Can't do diffs on them to see what changed" (Score:2)
Okay, PDF Diff isn't easy, but it can be done:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-u... [microsoft.com]
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* Requires a 2nd monitor in portrait since using on a single monitor is horribly inefficient
* Hard to edit without special tools
* Requires yet another app to view
Just on a couple of those:
There's nothing in PDFs that make them require a 2nd monitor over any other document display tool. I'd need the second monitor if I were multitasking with any other program as well.
Being hard to edit is a core feature, precisely why it's used so often.
And your assertion that it requires yet another app is straight away negated by the comment which follows, and that is that every browser has a PDF viewer baked in. Right now the most popular OS on the planet features a PDF reader out
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* Can't do diffs on them to see what changed
It could be more convenient, but still: https://vslavik.github.io/diff... [github.io]
Nice for Local Copies (Score:3)
OTOH, pdf makes laziness indistinguishable at first glance. So many times I've tried to copy pdf text only to find out that it was an image of a document "scanned to pdf" So many times I've tried to fill out a pdf form only to find out that the person creating it didn't go through the PITA rigamarole to make it fillable, or tried to save a form with filled data only to find out that if I don't buy something from Adobe, no one can read the data I've saved.
This is why God invented... (Score:2)
Re:This is why God invented... (Score:4, Informative)
You Cthulhu worshipers give me the creeps.
Oh for fuck's sake (Score:2)
"If the print was bigger, that would be really helpful. Now, I'm stuck in a PDF."
You know you can make the print larger in a PDF in several different ways, don't you?
No, of course you don't. That's why you're "stuck in a PDF."
99% (Score:5, Insightful)
99% of the pdf's I encounter are better designed, more usable, and more readable than 99% of the websites I encounter. The biggest problem is that pdf readers and modifiers have very poor user interfaces, probably because they are copying Adobe, and if you want to modify a pdf, it might cost you bucks for software.
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I presume they are arbitrarily limited to the time that Joe remains working on the format, and when he is replaced by Freddy, the undocumented formatting weirdness will strike at random.
Yes, I do support public hanging for users of DOCX, although garrotting might be preferable if they are government
I think it merits consideration.... (Score:2)
I thought that was the point... (Score:2)
I see a lot of government agencies using PDFs, and I believe that this is intentional - the agency must publish the information by dictate, but there's no intention that it should be readable or usable by the general public. PDF does that - it either takes to long to load, or requires proprietary software to read, or is just too annoying.
No Javascript, so I like it (Score:3)
No Javascript, no dynamic garbage, PDF's, properly used, are far superior to HTML when it's (as it so often is) abused with Javascript. Of course I mean this as a sighted reader; HTML offers semantics that PDF doesn't provide, but again, it's up to the author to use the right tags.
In short, a fellow engineer can produce a document in PDF format, and it doesn't matter what the Javascript kiddies do per the Marketing idiots' requests, I'm usually going to have a document that's more useful than an HTML document.
At least ads don't pop up in them (Score:2)
It could be worse (Score:2)
There's a local business owner who has Word documents on his site. I tried to explain to him that I never want to click in to that when I'm on the web. He was like, "it's so you can print it". Sigh...
I'm guessing that because he never had any problems e-mailing Word docs to people, he assumed it would be OK to have them on his web site. I mean... there's some logic there, but it's fatally flawed. The business is fantastic--it's just not a tech business.
At least PDF is readable on almost everything, and
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Word is probably worse, sure, but both have had catastrophic security problems over the years.
The PDF format is a brutal mess.
fuzzy article (Score:4, Interesting)
Obviously the problem lies when someone tries to use a PDF as a web page, or vice versa, especially when the user is not skilled enough to distinguish between the two. THEY ARE DIFFERENT TOOLS WITH OVERLAPPING BUT STILL DISTINCT APPLICATIONS.
To me, the article misses a core part of the problem. Modern web browsers complicate things greatly by trying to open every single frikkin file in existence in a browser tab. This is annoying, inefficient and potentially confusing for someone who is low on the computer-literacy scale. I understand what Google was trying to do with the whole OS-in-a-browser thing, but it makes things confusing.
I Actually RTFA (Score:4, Informative)
(My apologies for that heresy.)
That first section shows that the "study" doesn't know what it's talking about. Basically, it's arguing that PDFs are "unfit for use" because.... They behave like a sheet of paper and (paraphrasing the actual article) people are confused by that.
The authors are premising their position on the idea that people don't understand fixed-medium information. ("They take users out of a familiar context and into one that is outdated and clunky.") Because, apparently, people today have never seen a magazine, newspaper, book. or anything printed on a piece of paper or other physical material.
The following sections don't show that PDFs are bad, they show that the content creators are using them for the wrong things, failing to keep them up to date, and creating them badly. Along with a healthy dose of users who are idiots that would (based on their comments) be incapable of "navigating the UI" of a printed magazine.
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Failing to keep them up-to-date is one of the things I like about .pdfs. If I download product data from a manufacturer during design, and questions come up about the system years later, having the old product data handy in our project files is a good thing. And getting old information from the website is usually a big pain, at best a couple o
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I agree.
For many things, I want to be able to download a fixed copy of the data (I write for a newspaper, and having the ability to download a fixed copy is very important--and a PDF shows that it's from the source, not from me).
That being said. it's still up to content creators to make sure that the PDF is up-to-date (especially for things that tend to change with some frequency).
The proper solution is to have an HTML version (that's searchable, and works on all size screens), along with a PDF that sets a
Paper Consumption (Score:2)
PDFs were designed for paper consumption.
The PDF files are OK on machines with big enough screens, but they can be a disaster on a cell phone.
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The PDF files are OK on machines with big enough screens, but they can be a disaster on a cell phone.
HINT: Use a PDF indexing app. Problem solved.
My big problem with PDFs (Score:2)
PDFs try to force viewers to see things as the authors think they should be viewed, not as how viewers want to see them. It is so much easier to resize html to fit the users preferred page view.
Unsurprisingly (Score:3)
PDFs are still perfectly good for their purpose - making a document that is hard for subsequent holders to modify without it being obvious.
I routinely send invoices, quotations, even status updates to customers in pdf formats because a) I don't want them to be able to change the data to suit their preference, b) most people feel safer opening pdf attachments than docs, xls, etc particularly (as mine often are) loaded with macros etc.
Yes, PDFs are terrible as web-pages, they also are bad for cutting grass and flossing your teeth but you don't see landscapers and dentists insisting we GET RID OF THESE USELESS THINGS do you?
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PDF - except for those incorporating cryptographic signing - can be modified. It's more difficult than other formats, certainly. You have to know a bit about how the PDF is structured internally in order to identify, decompress, edit and reinsert the appropriate objects. But it's quite possible. I've done it myself.
Stuck in a PDF (Score:2)
Whiny Article About PDFs (Score:2)
What kind of non-sense is this?!?? (Score:2)
Just because people can't handle digitial fixed layout because they lack the basic brain functions to know what they are for (and what they are *not* for) doesn't make a format bad.
This is the Type-A bullsh*t that has been put out by dimwits posing as experts for the web since just about ever. The very same type that as project lead bloat a regular website beyond usability with sizes 4x that of the Amiga Kickstart OS for a single pagecall.
The amount of idiots I come and have come across in my field as a web
And Adobe Reader sucks (Score:2)
A lot of frustration can also be with the readers, and I'm guessing a lot of the computer-using public doesn't realize that there are PDF readers other than those that come from Adobe.
Adobe readers (since version 8 or so) are the one piece of software that can bring a multi-gigerhertz multi-core computer to its knees just rendering some documents. (I mean really?) They also have the most infuriating, annoying feature that made me curse out loud in the office and got me to go find alternative readers immed
Seeing as PDF is for print medium (Score:2)
Whining about it as a web medium is about as useless as thinking air is a good substitute for water.
time for the news (Score:3)
This just in, morons think simple stuff is complicated!
If the print was bigger, that would be really helpful.
ITS A FUCKING PDF MORON, YOU CAN MAKE IT ANY SIZE YOU WANT
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Since we are just making up what the acronym stands for, let it be known that the "D" stands for DONKEY!
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ORLY? [wikipedia.org]
Re: Seriously? Who's the... (Score:2)
PDF stands for Portable Document Format.
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Print will never die. Sales and marketing insists that material in-hand puts their brand and products front-and-center of customer experience (and they are probably right about that for 99% of people.) For that purpose alone PDF is unparalleled since it supports the complex workflow from graphic artist to finished, printed material.
If you do not think that print workflow is complex just try working in any design studio or agency that professionally deals with production to print medium sometime. Ph.D the
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