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Kill the PDF: Why it’s time to update or lose the format
- mimixco 7y agoPDFs definitely have problems but this "story" is an ad for a proprietary format called Turtl. Clciking through to the company's website and their example publications, these are much more difficult to navigate and confusing than PDFs. Users will find it hard to work through a Turtl document in a linear way and hard to figure out where something is inside the document so they can reference it again. After the time it took to get PDF made into an open standard, I don't think we want to go back to a closed format that's owned by only one company and which requires their cloud service to function.
- weinzierl 7y agoThe three limitations mentioned in the article are: - Too much scrolling - Creating a high-quality PDF requires the skill of a designer - Lack of performance data PDFs definitely have problems but this "story" (besides being an ad) fails even to convincingly cover them.
- wahern 7y ago> Too much scrolling macOS's Preview.app has great support for tables of content, which it displays in a sidebar by default, permitting you to jump around easily. And of course LaTeX and similar TeX-based frameworks do a great job of generating a proper ToC automatically. So I actually find PDFs better than web pages (even ones with floating ToC panels) or any other format in terms of ease and consistency of navigation. Except... the PDF viewers in browsers don't support ToC display and navigation. And typical MS Word PDF exports don't seem to generate ToCs, judging by the fact that I rarely (if ever) see a Word-generated PDF with a ToC--at least one that Preview.app displays. If Chrome, Mozilla, and Microsoft put in just a little effort here then the world of document sharing could be immensely improved.