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PDF: Still unfit for human consumption, 20 years later

• jandrese 6y ago
  Its interesting how many of these complaints about PDFs also apply to modern websites.
  • generationP 6y ago
    I'd say modern websites are worse. PDFs don't keep moving under your feet while the javascript is loading. PDFs can be straightforwardly saved on your computer. PDFs don't blank out if you lose connection because of ajax. PDFs don't embed malware from third parties.
    • dhosek 6y ago
      On the last point, PDFs can still embed first-party malware. E.g., https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/malicious-pdfs-revealing-techniques-behind-attacks/ https://www.sentinelone.com/blog/malicious-pdfs-revealing-te...
      • sliken 6y ago
        Or spy on you, without malware.
        • generationP 6y ago
          Modern websites spy on you by default, though.
  • gjvc 6y ago
    which is better / worse: DOM or PDF? I was until recently of the opinion that the DOM has led to more and more complex HTML and document layouts requiring demanding browsers to render the content and reflow the layout, and that on balance, this was a Bad Thing. On the one hand, this DOM setup is crazy. Surely a more dynamic architecture would be better where decoders are downloaded on-demand as the user goes from site to site, coming across content types not yet seen. This of course raises security questions, as to the provenance of the decoder and less so of the content. On the other, having come to the realization that the next logical step on the path to this scenario is WebASM, where the content and decoder are completely opaque to the user one can envision a world where there are a million different types of PDF, each with their own decoder, each trivially but crucially different. It's not a pretty thought.
  • sliken 6y ago
    My favorite fix for modern websites is firefox's "reader" mode. Pretty ironic that to make many webpages readable you need a reader mode, after all without reader mode you are supposed to ... do what?
    • jwilk 6y ago
      Watch advertisements. :-(
• alexfromapex 6y ago
  The design goal of PDFs is display on any device, not a platform for e-books, so this makes sense.
  • wtetzner 6y ago
    Yeah, unfortunately they are used for everything. One way to get the best of both worlds would be to have a normal webpage, but have the "Print this page" button generate a PDF that is nicely laid out. Often webpages are a mess to print. I wonder how difficult it would be to write a tool that can turn a PDF into a usable webpage.
    • kevincox 6y ago
      In theory CSS has specific controls for laying out the "print" format of page page so your browser's print action should do the right thing. However in practice many websites don't put any effort into this, which is probably an indication that they wouldn't put any effort into a custom solution either. > I wonder how difficult it would be to write a tool that can turn a PDF into a usable webpage. I was looking into this but it is basically impossible. Since PDF is basically a collection of images (with some "fancy" stuff on top) you can get the basics, such as text and headings, however you won't be able to do much for semantics or layout. All web-based PDF viewers I have seen just render each page to an image and put invisible text on top for copy-paste support.
• davrosthedalek 6y ago
  I'd rather read a well set, two-column PDF online than having to deal with pop-ups, ads, dark patterns, javascript problems etc.
  • binarymax 6y ago
    Are those the only two options?
    • Lev1a 6y ago
      Seems like that's more and more the case nowadays. One of the things I absolutely despise about the rise of JS is that many many modern sites won't display anything (just the white BG) unless I allow 3rd party scripts. Is displaying simple blogposts and other textual information with the occasional image or video embed so hard that one needs to load often multiple MBs of JS from multiple external sites? It's infuriating.
  • TheSoftwareGuy 6y ago
    Pretty sure you can embed javascript in a PDF document, actually.
    • davrosthedalek 6y ago
      Yep, but as far as I know, only works with Acrobat Reader. No other reader I tried supports it. Would be nice for presentations.
      • jwilk 6y ago
        AFAIK at least these support JS: MuPDF, Okular, PDF-XChange, Foxit Reader, PDFium.
        • davrosthedalek 6y ago
          I'm pretty sure that at least Okular does not support enough to make the animation with the latex animate package work. But maybe I held it wrong. I'm pretty sure I also tried Foxit and MuPDF for the same thing. I'll have another look. While I despise frame transition animations etc, for some stuff some nice animations are really helpful in explaining concepts.
• xhkkffbf 6y ago
  Uh, yeah, they have some big limitations, but they generally work well for me. It's rare for one to fail to do what was intended which is to display a document as it might be printed. Fonts and all. Isn't it true that every software project -- and indeed every project -- falls short of what people may want?
  • deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
• hirako2000 6y ago
  The advantage is that tools have been developed to make perfect positioning of elements (text and images). So pdf authors never have to worry about different reader form factors. And, when reading a Pdf, you can print it and get exactly what we see on the screen. So the tooling is very straightforward for the reader, just click print. With other Web content, it's the browser trying to fit things the way they should on a page and it generally looks horrible. Positioning elements coded in marked language into a page is actually a tricky thing. Until we have the tooling to magically make any markdown content (with images) fit nicely in a page, pdf will prevail. Any hint on a tool that can take my markdown and print out beautiful pages, without having to tweak a dozen params, please show me.
  • mattkevan 6y ago
    Bear is good at producing nicely formatted PDFs from markdown. Styling options are (very) limited, but I like using it as the documents always look good.
  • mekster 6y ago
    > Positioning elements coded in marked language into a page is actually a tricky thing. This is almost impossible to do right. Even browsers can't produce a PDF that looks exactly the same as a web page. If you want to programmatically produce a PDF from a web page, the best bet is to load up a full browser implementation just for that purpose as any other simpler solutions would certainly break the results pretty often.
• pjmlp 6y ago
  Nope they are quite alright and much better than the PS tooling that they replaced.
• transfire 6y ago
  The problem is that PDF targets the printed page, while HTML targets screens. PDF does a better job with respect to printing then HTML does for screens, because HTML has been largely repurposed for creating GUIs. Unfortunately PDF are not easily scripted, and HTML has essentially no support for proper printing. And so alas it all sucks.
  • gjvc 6y ago
    This is a remarkably complete summary of the state of things.
• ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
  PDFs for printing are great, and they make a nice portable envelope for my vector originals, but I despise them as online or eBook formats. For eBooks, I've settled on reflowable EPUB. I guess, in some cases, we may want fixed format, where PDFs might be useful. For online, I prefer HTML, usually as a continuous page, and with "pretty print" (@media print) CSS. I find it annoying that the page-break-% CSS rule seems to be ignored by just about every browser, or at least, interpreted badly. I really have gotten a lot out of the NNG folks; in particular, Don Norman, but they do like to kick anthills.
  • benrbray 6y ago
    EPUB is a non-starter for me as most e-readers haven't bothered to implement decent math support. We've had LaTeX math for decades now, come on people! Any HTML-based format like EPUB should be using KaTeX at a bare minimum, but instead I often see an ungodly mess of poorly-spaced notation in an inappropriate font, much like those old manuscripts from the 1960s produced on typewriters. Until these issues are fixed, I'll keep enjoying my beautiful LaTeX PDFs, thank you!
  • specialist 6y ago
    Reflowable PDFs were the Correct Answer. Since the beginning. IMHO Adobe has been a terrible steward of PDF. I have no idea why. (Source: Used to write print production software in the 90s. Some of my team went to Adobe. One was bored so banged out a PostScript clone hooked up to the newer image library in a few weeks. They all said the PDF libraries were garbage, everyone was afraid to breathe on them, no one was motivated to do anything better.) Re NNG: Agree. +1 Don Norman, whereas Nielsen and Tog haven't said anything interesting in ages.
    • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
      I didn't even know there was such a thing as reflowable PDF. Agree. EPUB is a fairly half-baked solution. Reflowable PDF might have been good, but, I guess there was never any support for it.
      • 6y ago
• smoe 6y ago
  > 4. Stuffed with fluff. PDFs tend to lack real substance, compared to regular web pages. The exact opposite is the case in my experience. Unfortunately the actual substance is often in a PDF and all the web pages pointing to it are superficial, copy and pasted and/or clickbaity fluff. They then go on about how in web sites the content can be better structured and navigated. Unless I'm misunderstanding the word in English, what has that to do with whether the content has substance? > [...] This leads to overwhelmingly long and inane PDFs You mean something akin to a book?
  • nattaylor 6y ago
    Like the authors, I find that content published as a PDF is often extremely verbose, almost like the authors are paid by the page. Government reports, or those prepared by consultants, are often the worst offenders.
    • MattGaiser 6y ago
      I had a capstone project in university where the clearest way to generate a better grade was to generate more pages. We put all sorts of rubbish in the report to make sure it made a "thunk" sound when we handed it in. It was nearly 300 pages when it should have been 90. The problem is, plenty will judge a report on its thickness. "It is thick, so it must be comprehensive." What percent of government reports are read cover to cover and what percentage are just ctrl+f through?
      • fwip 6y ago
        If reports are often ctrl-F'd through for relevant information, it seems likely that many people consuming it are reading far fewer than 90 pages in total - and wouldn't have read the full shorter report. Perhaps it is better to be comprehensive in government reports than concise, to accommodate a variety of readers who want to drill into different aspects of the report. (Of course, a PDF may not be the best structure for this! A well-formatted HTML reference with appropriate hyperlinks may be much more useful.)
• Yaa101 6y ago
  PDFs are for printing, they come out almost every printer the way they are suppose to, there are other formats like txt, office and html that are better suited for direct consumption.
• rayiner 6y ago
  Incorrect. Modern web pages are garbage and PDFs are far better. No auto-play animations, no animations at all, no bizarre hijacking of scrolling, etc. a multi-hundred page PDF loads in a blink of an eye compared to a advertising tracker-loaded web page. Screen size-adaptability and reflow remains a problem. It would be better to fix that on the PDF end than to move those uses over to inferior web technologies.
  • rietta 6y ago
    I have to admit, after a decade of tablets, I am back to printing some PDFS, reading, making notes, and scanning back if I want. It's actually cheaper than continually upgrading the iPad ;-p I still have the tablet but its not my first choice always.
  • SV_BubbleTime 6y ago
    Surely the technology exists to get all the things you mentioned without an insane spec that Adobe allowed to bloom out of control.... I mean... right!? Please remember that PDFs are absolutely capable of running code and do to deploy the advertising / tracking you listed as an issue with webpages. If you are part of Adobe's premier advertising / tracking club (whatever it's called), and the user is viewing with Acrobat, you can see what people printed, where they highlighted, how long they stayed on a page, where they accessed, etc etc. That's more of a problem with Adobe than PDF itself (never use Acrobat!), but that's hardly a rare theme when it comes to Adobe.
    • kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      XSL-FO withered on the vine and we still don't have a suitable PDF replacement.
  • tokai 6y ago
    Both pdfs and modern js webpages can be bad for online reading at the same time.
  • scrollaway 6y ago
    I'd like to see you try to have a conversation on a tech & startup news aggregator built in PDF, see how quickly your reader loads it then. You're talking about PDF like the only documents you've seen are printed from LaTeX / Chrome, but PDF supports forms, javascript, 3D models and more. PDF is an atrociously bad format, and I don't know what "multi-hundred page PDF loads in the blink of an eye" for you but even a 100 blank page PDF takes nearly a second to fully load on my beefy rig (I did the test a few months back to prove a point). [Edit: Other commenters made the clarification below, but single page render time is not the same as document render time] Clearly extracting text from a PDF is nearly as difficult as extracting it from a photo. Digitally extracting information from PDFs in general is awful, which makes the format awful for the various things it's used for. Not to mention that many uninformed users today still install the garbage / malware PDF readers such as Acrobat because they don't know any better.
• rietta 6y ago
  PDF is the ultimate WYSIWYG print substitute format. My mom in her 70s can create PDFs from OpenOffice/LibreOffice without much hassle. Ask her to create a web site of any type is going to be a problem. Now imagine the tons of business people who can navigate programs perfectly capable of creating PDFs. PDF also works GREAT as an archival format. I log into financial accounts regularly and save PDFs for each statement period. Makes reconciling a snap. And provides a locally archived document history for audits from taxing authorities etc. I never have to resort to finding paper. Finally, PDF works great as a native format that my office printer/scanner understands how to write to. I can scan those annoying tax documents sent to my office to PDF and archive on the NAS/cloud backup as I deal with it and know that I have my documents digitized so I can shred the paper.
  • criddell 6y ago
    This article was about people posting her PDFs online where they are intended to be read by a user encountering them with a browser. The authors seem to agree that PDF is a print substitute format.
    • rietta 6y ago
      I disagree that my statement was off topic. The author in summary states that PDF is "unfit for digital-content display". I gave a specific counter example of a type of regularly reviewed digital content that is beneficial to archive (in this case financial documents that may be necessary for tax purposes). While this is just one use case of PDF framed in a browser, it still stands as one. I have also in my years regularly needed to archive the contents of a page - such as a receipt of a payment or a report on something. In that case, printing the PDF seems to be one of the better practices. Saving as a Web archive (or whatever the format is called) is an alternative, but that is slightly harder to then print/fax or otherwise send to someone at a future date.
      • kindofastrawman 6y ago
        > I gave a specific counter example of a type of regularly reviewed digital content that is beneficial to archive (in this case financial documents that may be necessary for tax purposes). How is that a counter example? If instead of PDFs your bank had given you an HTML file encoding the same content, then it would satisfy the same purposes and have the other benefits that the linked article lays out.
• CalChris 6y ago
  The article is about online or for me, on laptop, but I also have a 32GB Kindle Paperwhite on to which I download a ton of PDFs, mostly papers but some books. For example, I concatenated Onur Mutlu's Architecture lecture slides into a one GB PDF file. I like that that the papers look like papers and that the fonts and graphics are rendered correctly. Links work but I don't use them. However, PDFs on the Paperwhite don't make for easy reading. I could and have converted papers to EPUB which is much easier for reading but less good for studying, and the purpose of these PDFs is studying. Yeah, I can grouse about PDFs but it's a tool which I use. By comparison, I check EPUBs out from the library and they are surprisingly pleasant to read on the Paperwhite. Yeah, the article is about the web and I'm answering about the Paperwhite. Maybe they have a point about browsing on the web. But for content meant to be read, for academic content, PDFs are pretty good. BTW, on my MacBook I use Skim which is much better than Reader.
• skybrian 6y ago
  One thing PDF's have going for them is that they are standalone files, so you can download and collect them. The advantages are similar to MP3's for music. HTML doesn't qualify since not even the images are included in the file. I'm wondering what other file formats might work better, and why aren't they more popular? Epub maybe?
  • OnlyOneCannolo 6y ago
    Lately I've been wondering what ever happened to XPS. My understanding is that it's basically just a zip file with XML markup and any other assets like images. It's both human-readable and machine-readable, which is great for everything from version control to search to conversion between formats.
• FerretFred 6y ago
  Sized for paper, not screens Yeah! This year I decided to support Indie journalism and help the environment by not having the paper edition mailed to me. Big mistake. They'd literally rendered the print version as PDF, and reading that on an iPad was nearly impossible.
• deleted 6y ago
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• ehutch79 6y ago
  I don't see how users hate pdfs? They're perfect for sending to print houses, so we know what we send is exactly what ends up on paper!
  • corty 6y ago
    Only after hours of linting. If you don't do preflight, colors will be off, some objects won't render, transparencies will be solid and maybe fonts will be missing. PDF is by no means idiot-proof in this regard. I've been burned more than once. However, PDFs are still better than everything else.
    • ehutch79 6y ago
      Agreed! Designers spend tons of time on creating a document for printing. I can only imagine if the print house devcided to change the aspect ratio or size of the final output randomly, or lower the printer resolution.
• zadkey 6y ago
  I think the real problem here is usage. PDFs make more sense for printing. Using PDFs to distribute content online instead of web pages is the real issue. Same problem with trying to use a hammer with screws.
• Santosh83 6y ago
  PDFs are great for typesetting for print, where you know the paper size and adjust everything pixel perfect to it. Nothing beats PDF when it comes to complex typesetting for print. Web pages are meant to reflow and much better for reading on smaller screens. Also modern web technologies can go far beyond a PDF when it comes to interactive/dynamic content, but web pages (sites) are also cumbersome for a non-technical user to download for offline use with all elements intact. But I suspect HTML will eventually win this. While HTML can be printed, PDFs will always struggle with changing device sizes. Plus the web is becoming more of an app as time passes while PDFs will probably remain dumb content due to security reasons, so their applicable niche is growing smaller as the Web creeps in scope.
  • dredmorbius 6y ago
    EPub is HTML for devices. Simplified syntax, defined structure, not locked to physical form factor. Still has warts, but a pretty good compromise.
  • coliveira 6y ago
    It's not true that PDFs are only for print. In fact, MacOS display technologies are based (at least the first iterations) on PDF. PDF for screen can work very well, the problem is that the industry never standardized this aspect of the technology. The result is that viewing PDF nowadays is far from optimal. I truly believe that PDF could have been a much better technology than HTML for modern websites. Instead HTML, which started as a semantic technology, was shoehorned into what we have today.
• Havoc 6y ago
  And even worse for manipulating with code.
• ptero 6y ago
  First, the article makes a claim about PDFs problems for the web, when read online, which is a lot less clickbait-y than "unfit for human consumption". On the technical claims: while I agree that PDFs are not ideal for many uses on the web, especially for current attention-span-of-a-fly web usage, they are great for things where I am willing to dedicate more time for an in depth look at the subject. For those cases the complaints that authors list about PDFs (linear access to information, lack of advanced navigation options, optimized for print (i.e., look best on a large monitor)) are not limiting and in fact beneficial. And some complaints (slow to load, stuffed with fluff, jarring user experience) are just as, if not more applicable to most of the web. My 2c -- work in R&D likely skews my preferences in the direction of paper as an ideal interface :)
• daffy 6y ago
  > Do not use PDFs to present digital content that could and > should otherwise be a web page. To get decent typography, one needs TeX, and TeX produces PDFs, not web pages.
  • corty 6y ago
    TeX can also be used to generate HTML or even ODF. But of course decent typography is only available in PDF or maybe PS if you like it oldschool
• tehabe 6y ago
  The British Government also published two years ago they reasons against using PDF https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should-be-published-in-html-and-not-pdf/ https://gds.blog.gov.uk/2018/07/16/why-gov-uk-content-should...
• alfalfasprout 6y ago
  This is so, so wrong. Yeah, OK if you have an interactive website (a chat or message board feature) then you have no choice. If you're trying to present information or an article I'd take a beautifully typeset PDF any day over some website with so many trackers and javascript it takes seconds to load. Not to mention on a tablet PDFs are much, much nicer to read.
• adrianmonk 6y ago
  PDFs exist to emulate paper (a need which won't totally go away), but maybe it would be nice if the format and authoring tools supported a sort of alternate rendering mode that is online-friendly. So for example, a word processor may be set to produce two-column text, and for paper that makes sense ergonomically. But it is horrible in combination with scrollbars. The same goes for margins at the top and bottom of pages. A typical word processor allows you to easily switch text to one-column mode or adjust the page margins, so with just a few changes it could render your document in a more online-friendly way. So when you save as PDF, it would be neat if it could include both renderings into the same document. In this hypothetical world, the PDF viewer would then decide whether to render it in faithful-to-paper mode or in online-friendly mode.
• commandlinefan 6y ago
  I usually prefer HTML content, but for long-form technical documentation, I actually prefer PDF because it's always written to be read "cover to cover" rather than randomly hyperlinked. I do bail as soon as I see two-column output, though - too painful to deal with on a computer.
• ahmedfromtunis 6y ago
  I wish MHTML had more recognition as well as a chance to play the role of a "portable document format". For one, it's easy to open (everyone has a browser on whatever device they're using), easy to work with either for creators or consumers and can automatically adapt the screen it's been read on.
  • sjy 6y ago
    Last I checked, iOS and Android devices don’t support MHTML out of the box. It would be more accurate to say that everyone has a PDF reader than everyone has a browser that supports MHTML.
• deleted 6y ago
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• 2ion 6y ago
  > 1. Linear and limiting Perfect for information discovery. Rich annotations and hypermedia features (external links, document-internal links, TOC) in PDF fix pretty much all issues stemming from this. All searchable (if the PDF has been constructed properly). Permanent, static structure vs everchanging, confusing messes of websites. The web is NOT QUOTABLE and unusable without advanced full-text search. Barely an URI remains stable. > 2. Jarring user experience. PDFs look completely different from typical web pages. Typesetting on the web is a clusterfuck. Subpar microtype. Font rendering issues galore, tens of versions of popular fonts purchased at different points in time from different vendors with differently messed up CSS font configuration settings. Fonts are not embedded, but hyperlinked. I want a maximum fidelity reading experience for large portions of text and classic formats, because familiarity aids navigating a complex document. There is no need for fancy styles and whatnot. > 3. Slow to load. Renderers differ in quality and speed. PDFs render lightning fast at acceptable settings and if you wanna tune for maximum quality, you can do so at the expense of slower rendering. Besides, it took 2.401ms to load the web page these points are writteen on, excluding content blocked by ublock origin. This point is delusional. A 700 page beautifully typeset PDF opens and renders in <<1s on my 7 year old laptop, and my reader will prerender pages to speed up navigation even more. > 4. Stuffed with fluff. The entire paragraph is invalid because PDF has all those features. > However, in PDFs, those techniques aren’t always used and content creators tend to favor quantity of content over quality and formatting. The same goes for most web content put out today. > 5. Cause disorientation. Because PDFs aren’t web pages, they don’t show a standard navigation like a website would. Document structure is clearly presented in tree on the right side if the PDF is properly annotated/hyperlinked and the reader has a TOC view (productivity tooling should have this). Websites lack this discoverability almost always, and if they have it, it looks different and works differently everywhere, creating disorientation. > 6. Unnavigable content masses. This has nothing to do with PDF and everything to do with the reader in use. A semantic desktop would index all file content, allow cross-linking between files using file:// or other protocols, and generally expose all content to a local or internet search engine. Google search indexes PDFs just fine! (Again, a badly constructed PDF may not contain text at all or broken text, but that's a generation problem.) > 7. Sized for paper, not screens. This is correct, and an advantage, because the web and most other screen content lack the fidelity of typesetting systems like LaTeX, ConTeXt, InDesign etc which each incorporate decades of digital best practice, and several decades more of typesetting knowledge. It is an disadvantage in special settings, like on mobile, but even then, PDF text can be reflowed with appropriate software. > Users Strongly Dislike PDFs It's my favourite format for archiving documents, knowledge, and even website printouts.
• flowerlad 6y ago
  PDF's predecessor was PostScript. PostScript was a Forth-like programming language that contained excellent 2D graphics primitives, including bezier curves, 2D transforms and most importantly, support for scalable fonts. PostScript was ground-breaking for its time and is the reason for Apple's early success. If it wasn't for PostScript and laser printers the Mac would not have been successful. PostScript was implemented in laser printers and printer drivers output PostScript language programs when you printed from an application like Notepad in Windows. High-end illustration and DTP programs output their own custom programs instead of being limited by the program output by the printer driver. Over time it became obvious that the programming language features of PostScript were not being used very much. Printer drivers typically output a fixed header containing some function definitions then they use these functions over and over for drawing the content of the page. What if these function definitions could be built in? Then the programming language capabilities such as loops and conditionals could be left out and we would still be able to do everything we're doing with PostScript. In fact the resulting technology would be even more useful because rendering a page can be done without implementing a programming language interpreter. Thus PDF was born. PDF made perfect sense in the early 90's when it was designed. Page Description Languages didn't need to be burdened with a programming language because no one was taking advantage of the language features. But then came the World Wide Web. PDF was the wrong tech for the Web, and PostScript would have been perfect. PostScript has all the capabilities of PDF, but it is also a programming language, which means you can dynamically alter how you render the page based on where you are rendering it. Alas, Adobe's direction was already set, PDF was going to be the future and PostScript is obsolete. In summary, PostScript was invented at a time when nobody needed dynamic features, and PDF was invented for a static world but then the world suddenly changed and needed dynamic features.
  • Santosh83 6y ago
    In that case why didn't the broader community adopt PostScript for the web? Was it because of technical reasons (too feature heavy and complex for HTTP as envisioned originally) or did Adobe have some kind of patent that prevented its free use?
    • 6y ago
• katsume3 6y ago
  Also relevant: https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/malicious/paper/33443 https://www.sans.org/reading-room/whitepapers/malicious/pape... https://digital-forensics.sans.org/media/analyzing-malicious-document-files.pdf https://digital-forensics.sans.org/media/analyzing-malicious... Malicious PDFs are still around, even today
• supernova87a 6y ago
  I don't know if anyone can suggest some tools, but my minor problem with PDFs is that any kind of data table gets absolutely mangled/unusable for cut/paste purposes after creation. It's like somehow the PDF generation process randomizes the order in which it populates tables, such that selecting by a user later is generally impossible. Maybe it needs to be interpreted / extracted from the PDF source itself, but average user graphical selection of a table is out the window.
• seamyb88 6y ago
  I started off outraged at the title and have become less so the more I read and think about it. I do, however, love the texed, typeset, verbose document. If reading was a Macho pursuit, these would be dogmatically ingrained.
• qppo 6y ago
  I think there are good and bad uses for PDFs just as there are good and bad uses for webpages, but you need a hot take like "unfit for human consumption" to get clicks I guess. For example, Agner Fog's instruction tables are something I look at from time to time, and hate browsing that PDF file for the information I need. Similarly, software manuals as PDFs are really annoying to use - and I've written them! But for research that needs to be referenced through other research in a bibliography, having concrete reference points relative to the length/start of the content is actually much more reliable than having semantic links to headings or a URL. I'll frequently find deadlinks in bibliographies, or missing webpages, or webpages completely altered and unable to parse from an illegible URL. Versus a page number, which may be in exact or slightly wrong, but is a good starting point rather than a dead end.
• euske 6y ago
  A big mistake is that people still consider PDF as a "document" format. In reality, it's just a convoluted image format. Because it's an image, it doesn't have any logical structure and reformatting them is pain. Worse yet, its syntax is the worst of two worlds - a mixture of text and binary. It's horrible to parse, display, and modify. As if it's like that programming language that everyone hates (and I don't want to name). But really, it's a burden of the future generation. We should eradicate it. End of rant.
  • coliveira 6y ago
    PDF is a document display technology. It doesn't pretend to encode the semantic of the document. PDF producers are responsible for doing this.
• deleted 6y ago
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• davidwitt415 6y ago
  Great attention grabbing headline, but it ignores the typical user scenarios where PDFs are created. So how is your typical Office worker who is probably using Word going to create this awesome web page? It's simply not realistic to expect that office workers are going to use HTML, and it's been tried for years and years. Nielsen may as well go after Powerpoint next. Same criticisms and human limitations apply. Yes, better formats exist in the ideal, but ignoring the user's real context and limitations goes against the principles of User Centered Design.
• RobRivera 6y ago
  Pdf is a format; the content is a choice of the author.
• sahoo 6y ago
  What will you do after printing the pdf document, send it to legal? Lawyers are not humans, right? I agree to it's good for paper not for screen, everything else is just phony.
• tzs 6y ago
  > Linear and limiting When I'm trying to learn something that is not short and simple, linear is good. Far too often when someone tries to present a long and complex subject via HTML, they don't provide an easy way to go through the entire thing in an order that is pedagogically sound. It doesn't have to be that way...but it usually is. I'm not sure why. Instead, they provide each page with a sidebar that links to other pages, turning the whole collection into a directed graph of pages full of dead ends and regions that have no links to other regions. You reach some page where the sidebar links to X, Y, and Z, which are all things that depend on what you learned on that page and you are now ready to learn. If you follow the X link, you may end up learning all about X but may never again see the links to Y and Z unless you remember that a dozen pages back you saw them and purposefully seek them out. It's very easy to not even realize that you missed a whole major subtopic. In a linear format, such as an actual book, a PDF, an EPUB, or even a plain text file, the author or editor makes a decision on how X, Y, and Z should be ordered. Maybe they decide X, followed by Y, followed by Z. Maybe they decide X, then Y, then things that depend on both X and Y, then Z, then things the use X, Y, and Z. Different authors might pick a different ordering, but they point is they have to choose something. Whatever they choose, you just keep turning the page and you'll hit it all. For a big subject, maybe you don't want to hit it all. I've seen math books address this by having a list or diagram in the front giving you alternate orders to go through a subset of the book if you just want to learn just a subset of the subject. In theory, HTML should be great for this, especially HTML with JavaScript. You could have a page that lets you select from different learning paths, and then the JavaScript would put "Next" and "Previous" buttons on each page that take you through all the pages on your selected learning path. You could still have the sidebar links, but if you follow one the JavaScript could add a "Return to Learning Path" button so you can always get back on track. But until more HTML authors put in the effort to provide a linear path through the material that books/PDF/EPUB/text formats force their authors to provide, PDF and to a lesser extend EPUB will remain the best option for most people trying to learn a long and complex subject online. (I give PDF the nod over EPUB because most EPUBs do not have mathematical notation that looks as good as it does in PDF. I don't know if this is a technical limitation of EPUB itself, or of the EPUB readers I've used, or of the authoring tools used to create the EPUBs, or simply the authors didn't know how to do it right). A good example of HTML authors putting in the effort is "The Feynman Lectures on Physics" online edition [1]. That shows you can make a website that presents a long and complex technical subject that works as well as a book or PDF, yet adjusts well to a variety of different screen sizes. [1] https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ https://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/
• centimeter 6y ago
  I disagree with almost every point in this article.
• nonbirithm 6y ago
  Highly disappointed there was no mention of the pain of annotating PDFs. The only way I've been able to reliably annotate a PDF with writing that I've downloaded on Linux is to use WINE or install a bunch of KDE dependencies just for Okular. PDF is a document format intended for consumption but so many institutions insist om giving you a PDF with no form elements and expect you to edit it and send it back. A web-based solution that would have a form that autogenerates the finished PDF would work so much more, but PDF is apparently easier for them to send and expect back an answer. As a result I dread PDF when using it as a format that's intended to be edited. I feel like this is a misuse of what PDF is supposed to be, as people believe that since it looks like printed paper then you ought to be able to write on it like printed paper.
  • bo1024 6y ago
    Do you have trouble with xournal?
  • asdff 6y ago
    I think it depends on your viewer. Preview on mac is pretty simple to fill forms and markup however you like. Forms are actually pretty simple to fill and tab to the next, feels like the format was made for this. I've had no problems doing this on PC with acrobat as well. I'm not sure what is out there on linux, but there has to be at least one fully featured PDF viewer.
  • abskr9 6y ago
    If you're looking for a simple web-based solution, check out http://zform.co http://zform.co. Takes form input and outputs a filled pdf.
  • davidgerard 6y ago
    LibreOffice Draw. I do this for PDF contracts.
• node-bayarea 6y ago
  I LOVE PDF
• GnarfGnarf 6y ago
  Although I agree that PDFs (and screens in general) are not the best for reading, the PDF file format is a minor miracle. It is a thing of beauty, combining text and graphics to preserve the author's design. I have built a business on PDF. I develop graphics software, enabling my customers to create large charts (36" x 96" and bigger) in PDF format, which they can take to the print shop for printing on large-format plotters and printers. The sharp crispness of PDF text and vector graphics allows unlimited zooming while never pixellating (except the photos, of course). If you are familiar with the technical specifications of PDF (1,300 pages 2006 ed.), you will appreciate the sophistication and power of the internal structure of PDF. As an exchange medium, PDF has made huge contributions to commerce, technology and culture.
  • xscott 6y ago
    Other than fillable forms, which is sometimes very important, I don't see how PDF is much of an improvement over PostScript (which came first).
    • thrtythreeforty 6y ago
      Embedded fonts are a big one. PDF lets you embed straight TrueType/OpenType, preserving all the ligatures, kerning, etc. With Postscript you have to convert. Maybe this would be hassle free, but I'd be willing to bet there'd be a lot of edge cases that prevent it from Just Working.
      • microcolonel 6y ago
        > preserving all the ligatures, kerning Far as I can tell, most of the time (all of the time?) PDFs just seem to throw out this information, and manually select and place glyphs.
    • dragontamer 6y ago
      PDFs work on Windows. Postscript just never had a big Windows adoption rate. From my understanding, PDF is largely based on Postscript. PDF is to Postscript as HTML5 is to XHTML or HTML4.
• crazygringo 6y ago
  Hard disagree. Also the author is arguing against a strawman. Normal PDF's are simple, reliable, and interoperable. In contrast to webpages which are actually more often the "clunky", "slow", "stuffed with fluff", and "disorienting" (with scroll hijacking) alternative. But the strawman is people creating PDF content as an alternative to HTML. Practically nobody is doing that. Virtually every PDF out there is designed to be a printable document first, that is then made available on the web. Nobody is saying "how should we architect our new site -- I know, let's make all our pages PDF's!" What a truly bizarre article.
  • cmurf 6y ago
    All restaurant menus in PDF are examples the complaint relates to. The less common case of actually printing a menu is well served by applying a print specific css. There's no advantage of PDF in this case, a menu doesn't need any of the additional sophistication that PDF brings.
    • larrik 6y ago
      Unless they want to use the same PDF on the website that they send to the menu printing company. There's no way you are going to order menus from a printer and tell them to "print my webpage".
      • cmurf 6y ago
        In fact you can, it's been this way for over two decades. W3C has been working on CSS and SVG print for that long expressly for cross-media print rendering needs.
        • larrik 6y ago
          You can but I wouldn't
    • crazygringo 6y ago
      To the contrary. Restaurants create a "source of truth" menu that they print for use on-premises, often daily for seasonal fine dining. That is going to have layout. Why is the restaurant going to go to the trouble of creating a second HTML version? I've found that often, when a restaurant has an HTML menu on its site, it's months out of date because it never gets updated. PDF menus always that are the same as what customers are getting at their tables, please.
• dkersten 6y ago
  I way prefer a PDF to most modern advert-infested, javascript-laden website.
• _reza 6y ago
  Paper is a vastly different medium compared to computers. The ignorance large companies(digital book distributors) show when dealing with humans(by only focusing on ebook sales and nothing more) is really annoying. Take Adobe Reader for example, it is really awkward in how dozens of researchers are unable to grasp the most basic feature of computers: dynamism. These people's minds are still stuck in Gutenburg era and they fail to notice how powerful computers are. Having had headaches with pdfs(I read lots of books) and the way knowledge is buried in this format, I started a project to inject some dynamism into our book reading. Please check it out if you are interested. https://github.com/rezahsnz/readaratus https://github.com/rezahsnz/readaratus
• cryptonector 6y ago
  There is one thing about PDFs that makes them OK: it's one file, with everything needed, so it works offline. That's not nothing. The Web N.0 is not offline-friendly, and while most of the time that's not a problem, when it is a problem, it's a nasty problem.
• sradman 6y ago
  The distinction should be made between fixed layout formats like PDF and reflowable text formats like HTML. In a RESTful sense, these should be two representations of the same resource.
  • michieldotv 6y ago
    The PDF spec has everything on board to support text reflow. A good PDF library will typically have the option to output what is called a Tagged PDF. Annotating the structure of the document allows readers to reflow the text. It's what the Web Content Accessibility Group recommends doing.
    • sradman 6y ago
      Good to know, thanks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#Logical_structure_and_accessibility https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#Logical_structure_and_acce...
• WrongThinkerNo5 6y ago
  I find that claim rather ironic, because I feel like the primary reason that PDFs are "unfit for human consumption" is a formatting issue, not as much a technical or practical issue. The reason they are unfit to read on line is that they are formatted using past formatting standards that are meant for print … not inline reading. There are of course some technical limitations to PDF that would prevent them from being mad "digital first", but even just changing page layout and adjusting margins and spacing and font for horizontal display (as most of our screens are) vs vertical layout as one would read a printed sheet of paper, would make huge differences. I for one actually compensate for that in that I have a dedicated monitor that is vertically oriented in order to read PDF documents. Better yet if you can do it on a very high dpi screen. But even that is not ideal because although I actually like print formats, standards, and conventions (like margins, spacing, and structure), it's simply not relevant or applicable in digital until we get A4/Letter formatted tablets or desktop screens that emulate physical paper … albeit even that, inadequately. Nothing can really replace the advantages of paper, at least not until we get paper thin displays that have zero measurable response times on pen inputs … i.e., likely never.
• pmdulaney 6y ago
  PDF format is useful if you want a hard copy. But do any of you know how to use Pandoc (or some open source or command line tool) to convert a PDF to something easily readable on a Kindle?
• objektif 6y ago
  If the alternative is epub i will take pdf any day.
• jcrawfordor 6y ago
  Any complaint about the PDF format tends to be hard to address because the PDF format is so complicated and so flexible---except, of course, for the argument that the PDF format is too complicated and flexible, which tends to be the one enduring criticism since it has lead to a history of various security, compatibility, and performance issues related to PDFs. The major attempts to replace PDF have largely failed, though. DjVu is relatively limited in scope. Postscript (as a document display format) has never been well-supported on Windows and is increasingly poorly supported on Linux due to rarity. XPS is perhaps the most direct "PDF replacement" but is nearly equally complicated (being based on the MS Office OOXML formats, giving it a similar cursed heritage to PDF's basis in the Photoshop PSD format), and there was never really a compelling argument to switch to it. What I don't get is the suggestion that PDF should be replaced by HTML. The purposes of the two formats are basically orthogonal and replacing one with the other is doomed to failure. The author's argument seems more akin to "print-layout documents should be replaced by hypertext," and perhaps this is true in some cases, but it's definitely a different matter and one that the author's arguments don't really support that well. In my opinion, hopefully more humble than the author's, PDF's main downside is the remarkable unevenness of the quality of the creation and reading tools, considering its supposedly "reads everywhere" nature. The "reference implementation" is a commercial product and supports a huge list of features that are rarely or never supported by third-party commercial or open-source implementations. The Linux toolchain still widely used with PDF (e.g. Ghostscript) is decidedly outdated and hard to work with, but there's not a lot of momentum towards development of more modern tools. All of these issues are likely rooted in the basic fact that the PDF format is extremely complicated, and so thoroughly implementing it is a massive undertaking. The author's complaints about performance in particular reflect the flexibility and complexity of the format. Web browsers have mostly switched over to using pdf.js to render PDFs, which is completely satisfactory for documents that consist of text or images (like scanned documents), but can be absolutely unusable when dealing with extremely vector-heavy PDFs like GIS exports. Even printing PDFs can become rather frustrating as the complexity of the format means that parse-related printing issues are relatively common. Even Acrobat, for a long time, would munge certain characters when printing due to some sort of inconsistency with how different generators and readers implemented font embedding leading to Acrobat not being able to locate the embedded character font. This seemed most common with the letter "l" but maybe I'm imagining that... but also maybe it reflects some frightening detail of the format or implementation behavior. One of the most common issues around PDF consistency comes down to file size... different PDF generators are prone to create representations of the same document that are significantly different sizes. Scanners are often an extreme example, some combination of not "knowing the tricks" for PDF optimization and a probably very low-performance compression implementation means that low-end network scanners often produce PDFs that are hilariously large. Opening them in Acrobat and using the "optimize file" tool can reduce file size by 90% without apparent visual impact... the whole fact that Acrobat has an "optimize" tool (and that Acrobat Distiller used to exist) speaks to the scale of this problem. Inspecting PDFs that are "optimized" by Acrobat can be an alarming experience, as well. You may remember that this played a strange role in Obama's birth certificate some years back, as Acrobat seems to normally split PDFs into all kinds of different layers and apply strange transformations to them when it "optimizes." It's hard to know how much of this is actually "best practice" versus just a result of Acrobat accumulating decades of eccentricities. So the bottom line is... PDF is too complicated for its own good, but then so are a great deal of other formats in widespread usage, like modern webpages which require complex parsing of multiple formats to render, and a great deal of historic cruft brought along with them. I'm not sure that there's any sound technical argument that PDF or web pages are a "better format," it's all a matter of opinion over whether you prefer print-format documents or hypertext, and that's going to be very application-specific.
• SiempreViernes 6y ago
  While the comprehensive ranking of file extension reliably by Munroe 2013 does not contain .htm or .html, one can infer by the related file formats, that html content would rank below pdf's. Randal Munroe, "File Extensions"; xkcd.com, 1301, 2013-12-09.
  • fcatus 6y ago
    couldn't you just copy the link for it? http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/file_extensions.png http://imgs.xkcd.com/comics/file_extensions.png
• onion-soup 6y ago
  At least PDF doesn't bombard me with click walls and cookie disclamers so that I can actually read and scroll.
  • tatersolid 6y ago
    I encounter many click-wrap-agreement PDFs in my dayjob. The hilarious thing is that these monstrosities are created by “security” people and work only in Acrobat on Windows with scripting enabled.
• mcguire 6y ago
  The title is clickbait: the article is (mostly) about how PDFs are not suitable for reading on-screen. (Which is mostly true.) Further, the arguments the article makes are gibberish: "4. Stuffed with fluff. PDFs tend to lack real substance, compared to regular web pages. When you’re building out a web page, you can visibly see how long it’s getting and how far users will have to scroll to consume the content. Methods of structuring and formatting digital content such as chunking, using bullets, subheadlines, anchor links, and accordions help users efficiently skim and scan sections that may contain the answers they seek amid long-form copy. However, in PDFs, those techniques aren’t always used and content creators tend to favor quantity of content over quality and formatting. This leads to overwhelmingly long and inane PDFs." "PDFs tend to lack real substance, compared to regular web pages." Really? Really? That's the argument Jakob Nielsen is going with? HTML is magically better? "However, in PDFs, those techniques aren’t always used and content creators tend to favor quantity of content over quality and formatting." In HTML, those techniques aren't always used! They often aren't used. And HTML somehow enforces quality of content?
  • young_unixer 6y ago
    > PDFs are not suitable for reading on-screen. (Which is mostly true.) I read PDFs on screen everyday and I don't see the problem with it. It's honestly a great experience.
• compscistd 6y ago
  Data communicated as PDFs when it shouldn't be has frequently been a pain. Recently, I needed banking data that was _only_ available as bank statements in PDFs or an unpredictable web ui. Consuming banking data as PDFs is a nightmare. The bank I was working with seemed to have spent _some_ money on its website (Regions Bank in the US, if anyone wants to know, but just so happens to provide .ofx exports for 19.95/month starting from the month you sign up, but not generated for previous months, although that's tangential). Meanwhile, my local bank that at first glance from its website seems like it's in the stone age provides a PDF statement that looks like it was made in the 80s (all monospaced font, no graphics), but they also provide a .csv export for transactions with seemingly no limits on date. The latter bank approach signals to me that data is in the format it should be in. No more, no less. The former suggests The PDF and a pretty web UI is the de facto standard for communicating tabular data when it shouldn't be. I get that PDFs online are a great alternative as a document that was originally meant to be printed and mailed, but it is a poor substitute for consumable banking data.
• jhallenworld 6y ago
  Well here are some reasons why .pdfs are better: 1. They are a flat format. Why is this good? When you text search for something it can be found, vs. in HTML where you can search only a single web page instead of a hypertext graph- I mean what would a complete search even mean in HTML? 2. They are also hierarchical. I can print a hierarchical schematic and navigate through it by clicking on sheet-blocks. 3. You can view 3d renderings in them. Someone can save their solidworks document as a .pdf, and I can open it and zoom and rotate the view in acrobat reader. There is certainly no standard way to do this in HTML. 4. There are no ads. 5. I can send somebody the complete thing as a single file. For a web-site I would have to send them a zip file that they then would have to extract- it's just not as nice somehow, though in theory it should be OK. This shows up in microcontroller documentation for example. Usually the chip TRM is a 1000 page pdf, but the software is a bunch of HTML files (a web-site really). It's inevitably easier to get the chip TRM than it is the software documentation. Actually in this particular case there is more- the software documentation is generated as extracted comments from source code by doxygen and it is usually crap. Pdf documentation someone actually wrote, so it tends to be better. When you get HTML documentation, there is often not an index.html file. If there isn't one, which document do you open first? 6. Every documentation as a web-site system has their own navigation method, whereas .pdfs have acrobat reader or whatever. Even on web documentation that has something like a go to next page or section button, it's hit or miss if it works well. For example, the placement of the next button will vary from page to page, so you can't easily just page through it.
• red_admiral 6y ago
  > PDFs tend to lack real substance, compared to regular web pages. I am seriously wondering which universe this person is from.
• mwfunk 6y ago
  They seem to be specifically talking about the case where you're on a web page, you click a link to go to what ought to be another web page, but instead you're in a PDF in your browser. I get it, PDFs are documents and not web pages, and dumping a visitor into a longish PDF when a concise web page with the answers they're looking for would be better. So, use web pages for presenting information best presented in a web page, and use PDFs for presenting information best presented in a PDF, and don't use a PDF when a web page would be better and don't use a web page when a PDF would be better. But that doesn't seem to be the point they're making for some reason.
• anigbrowl 6y ago
  Despite all the many problems with PDFs (frequent lack of internal navigation, too much or too little or just plain wrong metadata, inherently static) they're still great precisely because they print out the same way they look on screen (which is often something you want for a long or highly technical document) and because they don't slide around and constantly throw up modal dialogs. Don't get me wrong, I find many aspects of PDFs hugely frustrating. But many websites are just horrendous and a complete misery to interact with. If it's more than a couple of thousand words I tend to start looking for a pdf version.
• jneplokh 6y ago
  I have to disagree. I love consuming content through PDF format, even books, especially when paired with a great PDF reader.
• mmmrk 6y ago
  The article deeply resonates with me. I have been annoyed so often by a website splitting content into PDFs that would have been perfectly fine as HTML. I suppose this happens because the content department makes nicely (sometimes) layouted documents first to print and give someone to review _and then_ someone decides to throw them up on the website as an afterthought.
• nikisweeting 6y ago
  The durability of PDFs are one of the main reasons why they're one of the core methods of archiving websites in ArchiveBox.io. Despite being "clunky", they render much more reliably than HTML on the decades timescale.
• ssalazar 6y ago
  Its insane to me that Neilson/highly opinionated contrarians get any attention for this. Browse https://arxiv.org https://arxiv.org for 30 seconds and tell me PDFs are "unfit for human consumption." While its annoying to go to sites using PDFs that should clearly be a webpage, its obvious that PDF is good at solving some class of problems for certain people. The scientific community for instance has been slowly moving towards formats that can generate both HTML + PDF, but for many reasons related to its legacy of print publication PDF is king. To come in and just tell these people they're wrong is the height of obnoxious design hubris. Between that and the boastful self-accolades, delivered in 3rd person no less, its hard for me to take this seriously.
  • fortran77 6y ago
    PDFs may be unfit, but I use them every day. So what if they look like web pages?
• auggierose 6y ago
  PDF is great, especially for books and papers. Really the only proper choice for a digital technical book. Of course, you should read it on a device large enough, like an iPad Pro 12.9 inch.
• simonblack 6y ago
  While I'm not particularly enamored of PDFs, they are streets ahead of the previous widespread document format, the Microsoft Word DOC. The Word DOC format had the problem of becoming unreadable every few years until you managed to splash out and buy the latest and greatest Microsoft Word and its associated version of Windows. At least the PDFs remain legible pretty much indefinitely.
  • leephillips 6y ago
    This is important: it is a published format.
• mrtweetyhack 6y ago
  Anything from Adobe
• doonesbury 6y ago
  Um no. LaTeX + PDF = awesome. All tech docs in PDF are great. Look, web pages to the degree PDF is bad, is worse because it's riddled with adds and waits for servers you didn't intend to bother that, - "help you" - "give you info you might be interested in viz adds - all other manner of social media nonsense - and to pay the domain owner $$$$ Maybe the OP should stop getting PDFs from NYPOST, Vanity Fair, Mad Magazine, Graphics Designers Guild dot com, or Madison 5th Ave S&Mrkting.com
• Lammy 6y ago
  I just wish iOS Safari supported opening its regular document view for PDFs embedded on web pages in <object> tags. It treats them like an <img> and displays just the first page of the PDF with a transparent background letting the page show through. Of course there's no good way to shrink that UI into an arbitrarily-sized box on the page, but I'd prefer a button to open the regular fullscreen view over the current behavior.
• mrb 6y ago
  Here is Hello World in PDF: a single letter page PDF displaying the string "Hello World" at font size 48pt. You should be able to copy/paste that into a text editor, and save it as a .pdf file. Chrome can open it. It is fully compliant with the PDF spec (I believe). No unnecessary optional object is present. %PDF-1.2 1 0 obj << /Type /Catalog /Pages 2 0 R >> endobj 2 0 obj << /Type /Pages /Kids [ 3 0 R ] /Count 1 /MediaBox [ 0 0 612 792 ] >> endobj 3 0 obj << /Type /Page /Parent 2 0 R /Resources 4 0 R /Contents 6 0 R >> endobj 4 0 obj << /ProcSet[/PDF/Text] /Font << /F1 5 0 R >> >> endobj 5 0 obj << /Type /Font /Subtype /Type1 /BaseFont /Times-Roman >> endobj 6 0 obj << /Length 51 >> stream BT /F1 48 Tf 50 400 Td (Hello World)Tj ET endstream endobj trailer << /Root 1 0 R >>
• grumbel 6y ago
  The underlying problem isn't PDF, but the fact that HTML is still completely unsuited for long-form content. Really basic stuff like a proper markup-based TOC isn't a thing in a HTML. And on the browser side there are just as much problems, you can't bookmark your scroll position and basic scrollbars are a terrible user interface for long HTML content anyway. There are other really basic problems like not being able to link arbitrary HTML content unless the author of the HTML put an anchor in the document. ePub, mobi and such were developed to work around those limitation and make more usable book formats, but no web browser has native support for them (Edge had some support, not sure if that still there after the Chrome switch). Despite being HTML-based, those formats aren't really part of the WWW. PDF does what PDF was designed to quite well, it's virtual paper. But the WWW has kind of failed to evolve into becoming a platform where you can publish long-form documents on, so PDF still continues to dominate.
• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Let's not forget that the reference PDF reader, Adobe Acrobat, has turned into a pile of shit about 15-20 years ago, with "plugins" and stuff making its load time surpass that of browsers at the time, and severe security issues going unfixed, that PDFs frequently use text in non-semantic text order or even as stored bitmaps, with the deficiencies in searching and linking within PDFs that goes with it. Also, Adobe found it necessary to include JavaScript execution from PDF, and also dysfunctional PDF forms/signing and interactivity features such as linking which more often than not pose a problem rather than solution on the rare occasions where I've encountered their use. AFAICS, valid (?) use cases for PDFs (apart from sending out a document to a print shop) include e-books (incl fingerprints), academical publishing, user manuals, formal business and legal statements, and personal archival (PDF/A with prerendered layout and embedded fonts). Even as a critic of CSS complexity, I believe all these use cases except academic publishing should use markup+CSS instead, and if there are deficiencies in browsers, they can and should be addressed and fixed. I find it particularly painful that .mht, .warc, or other HTML-based archival format hasn't gained trust (and probably won't work well with today's JavaScript-heavy sites, many of which don't have a reason to use JavaScript except for lock-in, analytics, and plain incompetence).
• agumonkey 6y ago
  PDFs are horrendous but they work in their horrendous context. Most people are not tech saavy and want universal visual and printable. I so wish people could exchange text + svg but you need to educate and modify workplaces. Until then PDF it will be.
• young_unixer 6y ago
  Maybe I'm a weirdo or something, but I love PDFs. I basically disagree with 80% of what this website says. "PDFs tend to lack real substance, compared to regular web pages." made me chuckle. I don't know what kind of PDFs this person reads, but my copy of "Computer Networks: A Systems Approach" sure as hell has more substance and quality than a Twitter feed or whatever the author considers a "regular" web page.
• bluenose69 6y ago
  All the journals in my field (oceanography) show papers as HTML, with a link to get the PDF. I go for that link if a three-second glance makes me think the paper might be of interest. I am certainly not alone in this; I have never heard anyone state a preference for the HTML view. This is not just for one journal; it's for the dozen or so journals that I look at regularly. The mathematics looks terrible in HTML, and great in PDF. Figures usually look terrible in HTML, and quite often when you click on the action to zoom them, you get a choice of just one zoom factor. Plus, the caption disappears so it's easy to get lost. With PDF, you can select your zoom factor and maintain context. PDF has fixed page numbers, so you can refer to material in the paper easily. The fixedness of PDF aids memory. I can look at a paper I've not consulted in 30 years, and know that something I want is (say) at the top of the right-hand column just past the figure showing such-and-such. With HTML, I basically get lost in a stream that changes if I zoom the text (often required to try to decode poorly formatted mathematical symbols) or even change the geometry of my viewing window. I can highlight PDFs, and add comments to them. This is enormously valuable in research work. (La)tex-generated PDF files can offer mathematical representations that are not just clear, but elegant, and in a form that matches historical convention. HTML representations vary from journal to journal (which is bad enough in and of itself) and almost never match what the reader expects from standard textbooks and classic papers. I suppose HTML has the benefit that it can be set up to adjust to the viewing platform, so I can try to read a paper on my mobile phone. Not that doing so makes any sense at all. For me, it's an easy decision.
  • leephillips 6y ago
    Yup, that’s it. I’m sure any scientist or mathematician here knows exactly what you’re talking about. What do you use to highlight and add comments to PDFs?
    • bluenose69 6y ago
      I use a mac, and often use Preview to highlight and mark up, but sometimes I'll use acrobat instead, if I'm sharing with people who use windows machines, since then things seem to interoperate better. I don't know what's best for linux machines, since I've not used them in years. (As a professor, I need something that handles microsoft files, because that's what administrators use ... and that narrows the choice to windows or macos.)
• nearmuse 6y ago
  At least PDF books and papers are mostly self-contained and easily accessible in their pristine condition. This piece looks very inflammatory and appears to say "PDF is bad because PDF is not web" in too many words.
• bmsd_0923 6y ago
  Ok, boomer.
• blunte 6y ago
  Part of what makes the PDF experience so abysmal is the Adobe reader most people use. Apple Preview (and Quicklook!) is so much faster and more stable that I can forget how miserable the experience is for Windows users.
• StillBored 6y ago
  The author seems to want CHM... For all the PDF hate, 99% of the time the rendering is better than most web pages, and it actually works properly. I don't have scaling issues with it on hi-dpi displays/etc. I've also yet to see a browser do proper sgml/svg graphics scaling of high density (thing multiple hundreds of MB) maps/etc that are common in PDFs.
• aj7 6y ago
  I prefer PDFs on the web for serious reading. They have the least probability of having disruptive background processes and jarring graphics. It’s a pleasure when I’m alerted to a lawsuit dropping on Twitter, and I can find the actual pdf. I couldn’t disagree more with most of the assertions in this article.
• jjt-yn_t 6y ago
  Where I worked, messages that could have been plain text were PDF'd, then the windows email would need to be diagnosed into an unfrozen state... near-daily.
• dejongh 6y ago
  I really like PDFs. It is a portable way to render something not design for a web browser.
• eithed 6y ago
  Today I tried to get a blank PDF. I've created a blank docx file using official Word and used official Adobe Acrobat to convert it to PDF. On the first try I've received a message saying there was an error while sending the file. On the second and subsequent tries I've received a message saying that there was an error converting the file. So, after 23 years of development if a case of converting a blank document is not supported...
• indymike 6y ago
  The purpose of a PDF is to have a document that can be viewed and printed as designed and laid-out by the creator. HTML doesn't do that. The experience of an embedded PDF viewer is still pretty horrible (even new browsers have a pretty bad experience, and well, even Adobe Acrobat's UI is just... bizarre). PDF supported embedded type, vector graphics, and many other features long before the web browser could. Honestly, the issue with pdf is how documents are created (often via fake printer drivers that often compile/translate whatever you are printing to some pretty gnarly postscript).
• sivvie 6y ago
  This article is incredibly biased with completely unscientific claims seeming to stem from personal opinion. PDF is a great format due to the fact that the document will look exactly as it was intended and how you would perceive the document in real life. Using it for scientific papers, CVs or similar reinforces trust and that the author actually invested time to create a well formatted document. Additionally it is difficult to modify which also reinforces the authenticity of the contents.
• fomine3 6y ago
  As non-English native, Translating PDF is pain especially two col layout like thesis. Don't use fixed layout for web content, Please! (Seriously it's a11y problem)
• fomine3 6y ago
  This is just Android's problem, but I sometimes very hard to copy PDF's URL: Chrome for Android doesn't support to load PDF so it automatically downloads and opens in another PDF app. Reading PDF in app is fine but I can't copy url from app because it's already downloaded. Normally I can just copy url from link but some site like Google and Twitter uses link jumper so I unable to copy url. Yes it's same as other file types that can't be opened by browser, but other file types are rarely directly linked. PDF shouldn't be first-class citizen in web.