4 ms·

> 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 c

> 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.

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.