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Okay, but that’s not disagreeing with the article’s point, which is that it’s a bad UI for communicating digital content to non technical end users. The author

by SilasX 6y ago

Okay, but that’s not disagreeing with the article’s point, which is that it’s a bad UI for communicating digital content to non technical end users. The author supports its use for its primary case, and how you use it, which is printing.

Gibbon1 6y ago
I find that modern web UI are increasing shity on the desktop. In particular increasingly dog slow. But well designed pdf documents are still very good. And you can save a pdf locally. Seriously html is used mostly for delivering spam and porn. And pdf's excel for technical documents.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  > Seriously html is used mostly for delivering spam and porn. Oh come now. I know we all like to hate on the modern web but this just isn't true. Wikipedia, CNN, Amazon, etc all use HTML.
- rumanator 6y ago
  > But well designed pdf documents are still very good. You're just spewing a tautology. I mean, a well designed thing is still very good? Come on. > And you can save a pdf locally. You can also save epub and even HTML docs locally. That doesn't add much to the discussion. > Seriously html is used mostly for delivering spam and porn. It sounds like you're trying to force a morality-based argument to compensate for your lack of meaningful, rational points to make in favour of PDFs. > And pdf's excel for technical documents. They really don't. PDFs show good results in documents intended to be printed on paper following a very specific format, or whose main purpose is to deliver high-resolution vector graphics content intended to be printed. Once your usecase consists of consumption with a electronic device, which involves delivering reflowable content that reflects personalized settings such as reader-specific accessibility settings and device properties, PDF fails to be an adequate option.
  - egwor 6y ago
    I’m going to bite. The web site we’re discussing is full of poor points too. The person you are responding to makes some good points. - once you’ve saved it as a pdf you can email to anyone. Most (all?) phones support it out of the box. They can then print it out and you can be sure that the entire page is rendered correctly. If you try and save that as an ePub, lots of people won’t know how to open it. For HTML files; often the default HTML store is a browser specific format. Even more often there’s some dependency that means that the page doesn’t actually render after the web site changes (e.g. it missed a dependency or because of JavaScript use or because the format changed between versions). This is one of the reasons why tickets for events come via pdf. - read only. Want to send your CV and make it difficult for the recruiter to edit. Perfect solution is to use pdf. You also know that the pdf will look the same to the people reading it (and printing it) as when you created it. - want to create a pdf really easily? Print to pdf. Done. Want to reliably do that to HTML. Good luck. Often there are weird issues that pop up. It often doesn’t render properly once the complexity of the document becomes slightly involved. - PDF’s excel for technical documents. Yeah, I agree with this. They’re great at providing professionally rendered files, guaranteeing a rendered look across technical fields. This is why they’re used in research. Your argument boils down to ‘the pdf requires a very specific format’. Yes. That’s the intent behind pdf. It doesn’t provide ways to re-render the document, and I don’t think that it was intended to be used that way. Should it, so that less able folk are able to access content: yes. - All my lecturers used to use ps/pdf for their lecture slides. It worked very well. It got the info across and we could get a copy of the notes. All done. I feel like the only strong argument here is that it would be nice for the file to render for accessibility and for differing sized screens. That would be nice. Sounds like a great challenge. Overall this article is a bait article, and I don’t think it should be on hackernews. The stuffed with fluff argument basically boils down to PDF’s are bad because for the PDF’s we’ve looked at “Authors don’t use bullet points”. Cummon! Let’s have some intelligently thought out arguments for a sensible discussion.
fastaguy88 6y ago
That may be the author's point, but what he says is that PDF is unfit for human consumption. Which is absurd. As a scientist, PDF journal articles are almost always easier to read than the HTML version -- the graphics are of much higher quality, two column printing is more common, scientific equations and fonts are rendered better, etc. etc. If the article title were "PDF -- unfit for web presentation" the author might have a stronger case.
- SilasX 6y ago
  > That may be the author's point, but what he says is that PDF is unfit for human consumption. Which is absurd. As a scientist, PDF journal articles are almost always easier to read than the HTML version I don’t think the author was disagreeing with that either! They were saying, rather, that this effect is due to a collective failure to use HTML properly. If all you want to do is reproduce the physical pages of an article onto a digital device, and gain no more functionality (like text search, hyperlinking, reformatting), the author agrees PDF is great for that. But if you want to exploit all the features digital devices and the web offer, PDF constantly gets in your way.
  - elcritch 6y ago
    I still tend to agree with fastaguy88, PDF's are still my preferred format for reading science data, even on my digital devices. HTML data just doesn't have the font quality, layout rendering, and ability to ensure all the appropriate data is saved without requiring some remote server (and login!). My preferred digital device is a 12" iPad Pro as it shows the pdf in native 8 1/2 by 11 size. That makes me happy! Change the device form to match PDF.
    - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
      Yes, completely agree. Scientific articles on a phone are terrible--open the PDF and zoom/scroll around? You know exactly what to do and how it works.
  - rumanator 6y ago

by SilasX 6y ago

Gibbon1 6y ago

I find that modern web UI are increasing shity on the desktop. In particular increasingly dog slow. But well designed pdf documents are still very good. And you can save a pdf locally. Seriously html is used mostly for delivering spam and porn. And pdf's excel for technical documents.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
> Seriously html is used mostly for delivering spam and porn. Oh come now. I know we all like to hate on the modern web but this just isn't true. Wikipedia, CNN, Amazon, etc all use HTML.
rumanator 6y ago
> But well designed pdf documents are still very good. You're just spewing a tautology. I mean, a well designed thing is still very good? Come on. > And you can save a pdf locally. You can also save epub and even HTML docs locally. That doesn't add much to the discussion. > Seriously html is used mostly for delivering spam and porn. It sounds like you're trying to force a morality-based argument to compensate for your lack of meaningful, rational points to make in favour of PDFs. > And pdf's excel for technical documents. They really don't. PDFs show good results in documents intended to be printed on paper following a very specific format, or whose main purpose is to deliver high-resolution vector graphics content intended to be printed. Once your usecase consists of consumption with a electronic device, which involves delivering reflowable content that reflects personalized settings such as reader-specific accessibility settings and device properties, PDF fails to be an adequate option.
- egwor 6y ago
  I’m going to bite. The web site we’re discussing is full of poor points too. The person you are responding to makes some good points. - once you’ve saved it as a pdf you can email to anyone. Most (all?) phones support it out of the box. They can then print it out and you can be sure that the entire page is rendered correctly. If you try and save that as an ePub, lots of people won’t know how to open it. For HTML files; often the default HTML store is a browser specific format. Even more often there’s some dependency that means that the page doesn’t actually render after the web site changes (e.g. it missed a dependency or because of JavaScript use or because the format changed between versions). This is one of the reasons why tickets for events come via pdf. - read only. Want to send your CV and make it difficult for the recruiter to edit. Perfect solution is to use pdf. You also know that the pdf will look the same to the people reading it (and printing it) as when you created it. - want to create a pdf really easily? Print to pdf. Done. Want to reliably do that to HTML. Good luck. Often there are weird issues that pop up. It often doesn’t render properly once the complexity of the document becomes slightly involved. - PDF’s excel for technical documents. Yeah, I agree with this. They’re great at providing professionally rendered files, guaranteeing a rendered look across technical fields. This is why they’re used in research. Your argument boils down to ‘the pdf requires a very specific format’. Yes. That’s the intent behind pdf. It doesn’t provide ways to re-render the document, and I don’t think that it was intended to be used that way. Should it, so that less able folk are able to access content: yes. - All my lecturers used to use ps/pdf for their lecture slides. It worked very well. It got the info across and we could get a copy of the notes. All done. I feel like the only strong argument here is that it would be nice for the file to render for accessibility and for differing sized screens. That would be nice. Sounds like a great challenge. Overall this article is a bait article, and I don’t think it should be on hackernews. The stuffed with fluff argument basically boils down to PDF’s are bad because for the PDF’s we’ve looked at “Authors don’t use bullet points”. Cummon! Let’s have some intelligently thought out arguments for a sensible discussion.

fastaguy88 6y ago

That may be the author's point, but what he says is that PDF is unfit for human consumption. Which is absurd. As a scientist, PDF journal articles are almost always easier to read than the HTML version -- the graphics are of much higher quality, two column printing is more common, scientific equations and fonts are rendered better, etc. etc. If the article title were "PDF -- unfit for web presentation" the author might have a stronger case.

SilasX 6y ago
> That may be the author's point, but what he says is that PDF is unfit for human consumption. Which is absurd. As a scientist, PDF journal articles are almost always easier to read than the HTML version I don’t think the author was disagreeing with that either! They were saying, rather, that this effect is due to a collective failure to use HTML properly. If all you want to do is reproduce the physical pages of an article onto a digital device, and gain no more functionality (like text search, hyperlinking, reformatting), the author agrees PDF is great for that. But if you want to exploit all the features digital devices and the web offer, PDF constantly gets in your way.
- elcritch 6y ago
  I still tend to agree with fastaguy88, PDF's are still my preferred format for reading science data, even on my digital devices. HTML data just doesn't have the font quality, layout rendering, and ability to ensure all the appropriate data is saved without requiring some remote server (and login!). My preferred digital device is a 12" iPad Pro as it shows the pdf in native 8 1/2 by 11 size. That makes me happy! Change the device form to match PDF.
  - DrAwdeOccarim 6y ago
    Yes, completely agree. Scientific articles on a phone are terrible--open the PDF and zoom/scroll around? You know exactly what to do and how it works.
- rumanator 6y ago