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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

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.)
  - formerly_proven 6y ago
    Yeah, but who is actually going to read a 7000 page report on torture or surveillance? (Assuming these reports were actually published, which they were not)
  - asdff 6y ago
    Or a PDF document with a table of contents. Look at this clickable beauty containing a wealth of information in tidy categories: http://media.metro.net/about_us/vision-2028/report_metro_vision_2028_plan_2018.pdf http://media.metro.net/about_us/vision-2028/report_metro_vis...
- II2II 6y ago
  I ran into a similar situation, but decided to submit a short report anyhow. It earned one of my best grades in university. When I asked about the grade, since I ignored multiple guidelines, the response was that I said a lot more than most people even though I wrote less. It probably had something to do with my admiration of concise writing. It is something that I wish that I could accomplish more often.
  - leephillips 6y ago
    Good for your professor. I always refused to impose length requirements, but I would say what a typical length for the assignment would be (always in number of words, never “pages”). If you did the job in significantly fewer words, that earned you extra points. If you went long, but every word counted, you also got extra points. But any padding, wasting my time with unnecessary words, meant a penalty.
bachmeier 6y ago
Honestly, that's just silly. If they'd use html instead of pdf, you'd still have the same content. pdf is a format. It has nothing to do with the content.
- a-priori 6y ago
  The constraints and expectations of the medium strongly influence the content. If I had an idea and wanted to communicate it, then I did so by recorded video, by live video, by blog post, by Twitter thread, and by HN comment, the same idea would be presented in very different ways. In the same way, a writer who publishes something by HTML (blog post, etc.) will produce a very different document than if they intend to publish it by PDF (ebook, etc.). They tailor their message to the constraint and expectations of the medium.
- znpy 6y ago
  If we used html instead of pdf the whole society would collapse. Didn't anyone notice that it's basically impossible to save an html page today and have it load and render correctly and offline tomorrow?
  - kevincox 6y ago
    Perfect fidelity isn't there but all popular browsers have a "save page" functionality which seems to work really well.
    - spear 6y ago
      I've found the best way to save a page on a browser is to print it ... to PDF.
      - stOneskull 6y ago
        it's quite nice this way. much better than the old .mht file even. it skips the junk.
      - _Microft 6y ago
smoe 6y ago
Content is often written to a predefined length, no matter how it is going to be published. E.g. some news papers even if there is no print version anymore still decide how long a story is going to be upfront. And food bloggers, will fluff up an basic oatmeal recipe with 3 pages worth of childhood stories before getting to the point. Even if verbose, those PDF are often still the only place where the relevant substance is together. The websites referring to them then cherry pick from it. I spend a whole lot of time sifting trough goverment PDFs over the last couple months because it was the only way to get to the information I needed. It would be much easier if the content were available in different formats.
hrktb 6y ago
I think that's less on the format and more on the intent. For reports and what is traditionally viewed as "written form", reader is expected to have high tolerance for length and boilerplate. I see it as the pendant of the "younger generations can't read anymore" critic, where lenghty, rambling and diluted prose is becoming harder and harder to parse and focus on. On the other side page load speed and attention grabbing metrics are thoroughly studied for web pages and people value terseness, to the point of loathing click baits and endless listicles.
leephillips 6y ago
Have you ever visited https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/?

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.)
- formerly_proven 6y ago
  Yeah, but who is actually going to read a 7000 page report on torture or surveillance? (Assuming these reports were actually published, which they were not)
- asdff 6y ago
  Or a PDF document with a table of contents. Look at this clickable beauty containing a wealth of information in tidy categories: http://media.metro.net/about_us/vision-2028/report_metro_vision_2028_plan_2018.pdf http://media.metro.net/about_us/vision-2028/report_metro_vis...
II2II 6y ago
I ran into a similar situation, but decided to submit a short report anyhow. It earned one of my best grades in university. When I asked about the grade, since I ignored multiple guidelines, the response was that I said a lot more than most people even though I wrote less. It probably had something to do with my admiration of concise writing. It is something that I wish that I could accomplish more often.
- leephillips 6y ago
  Good for your professor. I always refused to impose length requirements, but I would say what a typical length for the assignment would be (always in number of words, never “pages”). If you did the job in significantly fewer words, that earned you extra points. If you went long, but every word counted, you also got extra points. But any padding, wasting my time with unnecessary words, meant a penalty.

bachmeier 6y ago

Honestly, that's just silly. If they'd use html instead of pdf, you'd still have the same content. pdf is a format. It has nothing to do with the content.

a-priori 6y ago
The constraints and expectations of the medium strongly influence the content. If I had an idea and wanted to communicate it, then I did so by recorded video, by live video, by blog post, by Twitter thread, and by HN comment, the same idea would be presented in very different ways. In the same way, a writer who publishes something by HTML (blog post, etc.) will produce a very different document than if they intend to publish it by PDF (ebook, etc.). They tailor their message to the constraint and expectations of the medium.
znpy 6y ago
If we used html instead of pdf the whole society would collapse. Didn't anyone notice that it's basically impossible to save an html page today and have it load and render correctly and offline tomorrow?
- kevincox 6y ago
  Perfect fidelity isn't there but all popular browsers have a "save page" functionality which seems to work really well.
  - spear 6y ago
    I've found the best way to save a page on a browser is to print it ... to PDF.
    - stOneskull 6y ago
      it's quite nice this way. much better than the old .mht file even. it skips the junk.
    - _Microft 6y ago

smoe 6y ago

Content is often written to a predefined length, no matter how it is going to be published. E.g. some news papers even if there is no print version anymore still decide how long a story is going to be upfront. And food bloggers, will fluff up an basic oatmeal recipe with 3 pages worth of childhood stories before getting to the point. Even if verbose, those PDF are often still the only place where the relevant substance is together. The websites referring to them then cherry pick from it. I spend a whole lot of time sifting trough goverment PDFs over the last couple months because it was the only way to get to the information I needed. It would be much easier if the content were available in different formats.

hrktb 6y ago

I think that's less on the format and more on the intent. For reports and what is traditionally viewed as "written form", reader is expected to have high tolerance for length and boilerplate. I see it as the pendant of the "younger generations can't read anymore" critic, where lenghty, rambling and diluted prose is becoming harder and harder to parse and focus on. On the other side page load speed and attention grabbing metrics are thoroughly studied for web pages and people value terseness, to the point of loathing click baits and endless listicles.

leephillips 6y ago

Have you ever visited https://arxiv.org/ https://arxiv.org/?