11 ms·

There is something really pleasing about reading PDFs. It’s perhaps how static it is and it won’t change on me. I can zoom in or “operate” on it without some re

There is something really pleasing about reading PDFs. It’s perhaps how static it is and it won’t change on me. I can zoom in or “operate” on it without some reorganization. It puts the mind to ease. There is no reflowing. There is no columns shifting. It’s just is. Like a piece of paper as an analog - the intent of the author and the designer is retained and frozen in time. Fonts are embedded and chosen by the creator. Haters of PDFs do not understand the human aspects of it - they just see it as a specification (which is convoluted).

maga 6y ago
Maybe it's simply a force of habit at this point, but I can only read/study/memorize technical stuff from PDF/paginated source--I memorize the overall "picture" of the page and it's location along with the bits I actually need, and it's really tough to do with non-paginated sources.
- Nullabillity 6y ago
  Sounds like scrolling is actually a positive then, by forcing you to focus on understanding the content rather than relying on rote memorization.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Spatial memory is not rote memorisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
    - Nullabillity 6y ago
      Not sure what you're trying to say, that article pretty much only talks about its applicability to (inherently rote) memorization contests. It doesn't say _anything_ about meaningfully integrating the information as knowledge. Which also seems to align with the article's description of how it works: you're not trying to figure out the underlying structure of what's going on, you're making up a new structure as you go based on the surface-level patterns.
      - dredmorbius 6y ago
        False. The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. Yates's work, cited, expands on this. The method is useful for both specific itemised momorisation (rote) and more general (holistic, integrative, syncretic, synoptic, networked, dynamic) recall and understanding.
- imposterr 6y ago
  Yes! I totally get this. I think it's akin to the "mind palace" method popularized in media.
  - maga 6y ago
    That's an apt observation, actually. I used to practice mind palace when I had to memorize lists, and I do feel more comfortable when information is "physically" placed somewhere like a page, I guess it's all connected.
    - hikarudo 6y ago
      I wonder if source code could be read and understood more effectively if it were paginated.
      - jhgb 6y ago
        I'm happy that someone came Forth with that idea here.
      - Jiocus 6y ago
        Source code often does facilitate it's own method of paginating, into different files. One could argue that is the whole point of the practice. Pagination or not, both pagination and files provide some degree of spatial sense just as 'loci' and memory palaces. Edit addendum: There are theories about which senses are our dominant ones, and how they affect our learning processes. Some may lean towards visual ques in their mental life, others on kinetic or sound. Personlly I experience my mental models as spatial. Even abstract thoughts become situated "somewhere", if not by itself, then by contrast of other things on my mind. "Everything is a Memory palace." Needless to say, when I'm deep off in a terminal with something, I don't think I'd describe it as text-based.
        cycomanic 6y ago
        Actually the whole different people learn with different senses has been disproved in neuroscience. It's a myth that holds itself persistently in education. There is a very good article about this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817
- bonestamp2 6y ago
  I think PDFs are also less distracting since they tend to have very minimal navigation elements, very few advertisements if any, rarely ever have animation or video content, etc.
bobbylarrybobby 6y ago
Isn’t zooming in and having text reflow a feature, not a bug, of HTML? PDFs are pretty much impossible to read on a phone because of the endless amount of zooming in and out and horizontal scrolling (unless they were designed for mobile — and then they’re hard to read on a desktop). Never mind users on a desktop who just like their text large for ease of reading — their screen might not be wide enough to fit the text without horizontally scrolling. As an author, my intent is that the content be easily readable to all readers. I don’t see why I should want or get to dictate the layout and aesthetics to my readers.
- lolinder 6y ago
  What's a feature in one context can be a bug in another. I get where OP is coming from: when I zoom in and the text reflows, it's easy to lose my place. PDFs don't have that problem. Also, digital, free-flow media lose basically all sense of space. PDFs are much better for finding a piece of content again later, because I can remember the location on the page and roughly how many pages into the document.
  - Gehinnn 6y ago
    Usually, if you have reflow, you can disable it. However, if you don't have reflow, you cannot usually enable it!
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
      Opera does better, or at least it used to.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      Many PDF readers / eBook readers now at least try to reflow PDFs. This often works, though it often doesn't. Though too be fair, reflowing HTML / displaying it without all the added-on cruft also often fails these days. Tools such as Reader Mode make heroic efforts, but also very frequently fail (or are apparently blocked or have sites blacklisted by tools).
  - 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
cryptoz 6y ago
I have the opposite experience. To me, opening a PDF puts me on edge. My computer is likely to slow to a crawl. It never renders correctly - sometimes it will slowly render each page, one at a time, flashing the screen as it goes. Or maybe the PDF is using some features that my reader doesn't support so it renders incomplete and incorrectly. Links are often hard to pick out. What is a link and what isn't? What happens when I click on something, is it going to stay in the PDF or open a browser or something? Don't get me started on moving around in PDFs. There are always 2 sets of page numbers, one for the PDF and one of the document. Extremely confusing. Searching. Ugh, searching a PDF is a nightmare I don't want to even think about right now. Ctrl+F is broken 99% of the time. Or at least, that's my experience over the last 20 years. Sure, it's gotten better recently, but, not enough to make my mind 'at ease' exactly. Very stressful to open a PDF still, usually.
- chmod775 6y ago
  > To me, opening a PDF puts me on edge. My computer is likely to slow to a crawl. It never renders correctly - sometimes it will slowly render each page, one at a time, flashing the screen as it goes. That probably isn't the fault of the PDF, but the PDF reader you're using. > Searching. Ugh, searching a PDF is a nightmare I don't want to even think about right now. Ctrl+F is broken 99% of the time. Now this is actually the fault of PDF and how it does positioning of stuff within it - but about 50% of the blame lies with whichever software generated a shit PDF.
  - LordDragonfang 6y ago
    >Now this is actually the fault of PDF and how it does positioning of stuff within it - but about 50% of the blame lies with whichever software generated a shit PDF. Arguably, it's still the fault of the horribly overcomplicated pdf spec -- html manages to do it just fine, with a plain text format, to boot
    - kaba0 6y ago
      Well, it’s an interesting competition, but I believe HTML(+CSS to be fair) would win the complexity of the spec price hands down.
bqmjjx0kac 6y ago
I don't have much experience with PDF as a spec, but I guess I'm a "PDF hater." It's the things that didn't need to be PDFs, but inexplicably are, that annoy me. Like data dumps from local governments that could have been machine-readable, or announcements that are distributed in print and emailed as PDFs, rather than lifting the content into the message body.
- BostonEnginerd 6y ago
  Our city council posts PDF files which consist of scans of documents someone printed out. Sometimes they turn on OCR, but not often.
- axiolite 6y ago
  > data dumps from local governments that could have been machine-readable, or announcements that are distributed in print and emailed as PDFs, rather than lifting the content into the message body. You should thank PDF for giving you any useful electronic copies at all. If it's scanned-in papers, sticking them loosly in an e-mail or web page would be much more difficult to read through. If it's text data, then perhaps it was primarily composed to be printed, and PDF allows easy creation of readable electronic copies with minimum of effort from any input. Before PDF you might have gotten nothing at all, because most people don't have readers for various obscure proprietary input formats. And PDF is far easier than other formats to convert into another format for your own consumption. Do you have a command-line tool which will extract the embedded images out of a Microsoft Word document? Or one that will convert it to plain text, preserving formatting? pdfimages and pdftotext -layout are very widely available.
  - Aeolun 6y ago
    > You should thank PDF for giving you any useful electronic copies at all. I think the point is that data dumps in PDF format are not useful at all. I take objection to your statement that it’s easier to convert. The only reason there are so many tools to do so is because it’s so hard/impossible in the first place.
    - 6y ago
Lammy 6y ago
Also they can be justified in ways browsers can’t (yet) do. Every web page has a ragged right.
- chmod775 6y ago
  Like this (the demo at the top is interactive)? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-align https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-align
  - KMnO4 6y ago
    Interesting, there’s absolutely no difference between justify and align left on iOS Safari. I wouldn’t have guessed that’s an unsupported feature. I guess it’s not common enough for me to notice throughout the web.
    - abhinav22 6y ago
      Justify works in iOS Safari (I just checked). I like to use it in my designs sometimes :)
    - URSpider94 6y ago
      Works fine for me.
  - Lammy 6y ago
    No, like ‘text-justify: inter-character’: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-justify https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-justif...
- jimmygrapes 6y ago
  I have been trying to place the justification format I have seen in some print books. In most cases it will add spaces between words to make up for sentences with words that can't be split easily, but it also doesn't fully right-justify the last letter of the line. It seems to be something like "add inter-word spacing unless spacing exceeds X"
tambourine_man 6y ago
Copy/pasting can be infuriating though. The web is catching up fast however, but at least I can view source/inspect.
yawaworht1978 6y ago
Furthermore, even on mobile devices, everything just work. Ctrl+f is non invasive, if I close the document in the middle of 100s of pages and reopen the document, I do not need to scroll, unlike many web apps it preserves the scroll location. It does what it needs to do without any hiccups.
tomjen3 6y ago
As I discovered by accident fonts are not automatically embedded in PDFs. PDFs are great when you want to read them on a large enough screen. They are not great on a Kindle or a phone. I wish there was a way to have several different layouts in one PDF file, so you could have the same content but with different layouts and then your device could select the most appropriate one.
- jtbayly 6y ago
  Do you know if it would be possible to get the same font(s) used on the webpage also used in the PDF?
  - tomjen3 6y ago
    I don't see why not, the other way is more difficult as a PDF might only have the part of the font it uses embedded.
qbasic_forever 6y ago
The typesetting is better because PDF documents don't have to flow and resize across screens. This means a post-processing step can tweak hypenation, letter spacing, etc. to give the whole document a pleasing look. On the web it's a lot more difficult, but not impossible, to do the same and work on every possible size screen. There's also growing work to make typesetting style hyphenation and such work in browsers in the near future: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens
tyingq 6y ago
"It’s perhaps how static it is and it won’t change on me." You might be surprised that's not always true. https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/FreeStuff/PDFSamples/JavaScriptClock.pdf https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/FreeStuff/PDFSamples/Jav...
jwr 6y ago
The great thing about PDFs is that you can open huge documents and page through them quickly. I feel this is under-appreciated in today's world, where scrolling is being forced on us everywhere. Scrolling sucks for reading text. Every time you scroll, you have to pay attention to how much you scrolled, and then find your place in the text again. As for paging speed, just try using GoodReader or PDF Expert on an iPad. I can flip through thousand-page manuals and datasheets as quickly as if it were a paper book. And a 12" iPad shows an entire A4 page without the need for zooming and panning. In my experience, people who dislike reading PDFs have only tried doing so in Acrobat Reader (which is hot garbage, and slow), on a small screen that is wider than it is tall, zoomed in so that only half a page is being shown. That is a sub-par experience indeed.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Be it pdfs or html, I find my place through chapters, rather than pages.
  - pvorb 6y ago
    Haven't you ever been forced to stop reading in the middle of a chapter? It happens to me all the time.
    - BlueTemplar 6y ago
      Depends what you mean. Temporary interruptions yes. But then the location is kept. Interruptions for a very long time ? I might have to reread the whole chapter anyway...
- Thrymr 6y ago
  > I feel this is under-appreciated in today's world, where scrolling is being forced on us everywhere. Scrolling sucks for reading text. Every time you scroll, you have to pay attention to how much you scrolled, and then find your place in the text again. This is incredibly important, and something that dedicated book readers like Kindles get right, but I've never seen done well in long web pages. Discrete "pages" (that correspond to "screens") make it much easier to find your place as you go to the next page. Note that multipart web pages often have you scroll through each "page" separately, and give you the worst of both worlds. Sure, PDF isn't always best for reading on a computer or phone screen, but infinite scrolling is annoying too.
michaelgrafl 6y ago
First thing I do when opening a Word document at work is converting it to PDF and reopen it in Sumatra Reader. It just feels a lot better to me. It opens faster, it opens at the position I left it at, zooming in and out is fast, scrolling is smoother, and even if I wanted to, I couldn't modify it on accident. It just feels a lot more reified than something that is responsive or editable. Not great for mobile, but that's not what I care for at work.
agumonkey 6y ago
I've been obsessed with dynamicity and having everything adaptable.. but yeah static stuff have this weird feeling of 'right'.
crazygringo 6y ago
I know! The first thing I do with an .epub or .mobi is convert it to PDF. That way, I can read it and feel my "place", highlight passages that get saved in the file (not my reader application), and annotate in margins, circle big sections, etc. I feel like the annotation abilities of PDF's get ignored, but they're HUGE.
- Epitom3 6y ago
  > The first thing I do with an .epub or .mobi is convert it to PDF. b r u h
- bscphil 6y ago
  Same here. It helps to have a solid PDF viewer (I use Okular), but what's also really underappreciated is the vastly better typography in PDFs. I suppose it depends partly on the viewer, but epubs tend to be hot garbage to look at. Fortunately ebook-convert (from the Calibre project) generates great looking PDFs and lets you set a bunch of options like fonts and so on. This is especially important if I'm on mobile, because I can create an easily readable PDF in portrait mode that works great with the Android default PDF reader, whereas the obvious choice to open epubs (Google Books) is terrible: it's slow and battery heavy, and requires you to upload the epub so that it can be converted into the native format. (Once the conversion process choked and I somehow ended up with a 1 GB file.)
Black101 6y ago
Wouldn't an SVG be better, then?
akerr 6y ago
PDFs are designed to be printed and HTML tends to be overrun by ads. The former is nicer for reading and the latter is nicer still with ad-blocking, reader mode and/or a tasteful design.
tester89 6y ago
I mean I dislike PDFs for the exact reasons you cite, they don't reflow and fonts are embedded and chosen by the creator. Occasionally these choices can be good, but often I want to resize the text-size to make reading more comfortable which is easy with HTML or an EPUB, but with PDF I can only zoom so much before I must pan to actually read the entire line. Similarly, I think that the creator's font choice is often the wrong choice, it's very common for me to change fonts on an EPUB, but I can't do that for a PDF which is frustrating.
ksec 6y ago
It is funny this is being upvoted as the top comment on HN, last time something similar was said, HN were piling in how awful PDF is and HTML is going to take over the world of publishing along with the coming death of PDF. >Haters of PDFs do not understand the human aspects of it Unfortunately UX is not something HN audience or Tech in general are good at. ( Apart from Apple )

maga 6y ago

Maybe it's simply a force of habit at this point, but I can only read/study/memorize technical stuff from PDF/paginated source--I memorize the overall "picture" of the page and it's location along with the bits I actually need, and it's really tough to do with non-paginated sources.

Nullabillity 6y ago
Sounds like scrolling is actually a positive then, by forcing you to focus on understanding the content rather than relying on rote memorization.
- dredmorbius 6y ago
  Spatial memory is not rote memorisation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Method_of_loci
  - Nullabillity 6y ago
    Not sure what you're trying to say, that article pretty much only talks about its applicability to (inherently rote) memorization contests. It doesn't say _anything_ about meaningfully integrating the information as knowledge. Which also seems to align with the article's description of how it works: you're not trying to figure out the underlying structure of what's going on, you're making up a new structure as you go based on the surface-level patterns.
    - dredmorbius 6y ago
      False. The method of loci (loci being Latin for "places") is a strategy of memory enhancement which uses visualizations of familiar spatial environments in order to enhance the recall of information. Yates's work, cited, expands on this. The method is useful for both specific itemised momorisation (rote) and more general (holistic, integrative, syncretic, synoptic, networked, dynamic) recall and understanding.
imposterr 6y ago
Yes! I totally get this. I think it's akin to the "mind palace" method popularized in media.
- maga 6y ago
  That's an apt observation, actually. I used to practice mind palace when I had to memorize lists, and I do feel more comfortable when information is "physically" placed somewhere like a page, I guess it's all connected.
  - hikarudo 6y ago
    I wonder if source code could be read and understood more effectively if it were paginated.
    - jhgb 6y ago
      I'm happy that someone came Forth with that idea here.
    - Jiocus 6y ago
      Source code often does facilitate it's own method of paginating, into different files. One could argue that is the whole point of the practice. Pagination or not, both pagination and files provide some degree of spatial sense just as 'loci' and memory palaces. Edit addendum: There are theories about which senses are our dominant ones, and how they affect our learning processes. Some may lean towards visual ques in their mental life, others on kinetic or sound. Personlly I experience my mental models as spatial. Even abstract thoughts become situated "somewhere", if not by itself, then by contrast of other things on my mind. "Everything is a Memory palace." Needless to say, when I'm deep off in a terminal with something, I don't think I'd describe it as text-based.
      - cycomanic 6y ago
        Actually the whole different people learn with different senses has been disproved in neuroscience. It's a myth that holds itself persistently in education. There is a very good article about this: https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817 https://www.nature.com/articles/nrn3817
bonestamp2 6y ago
I think PDFs are also less distracting since they tend to have very minimal navigation elements, very few advertisements if any, rarely ever have animation or video content, etc.

bobbylarrybobby 6y ago

Isn’t zooming in and having text reflow a feature, not a bug, of HTML? PDFs are pretty much impossible to read on a phone because of the endless amount of zooming in and out and horizontal scrolling (unless they were designed for mobile — and then they’re hard to read on a desktop). Never mind users on a desktop who just like their text large for ease of reading — their screen might not be wide enough to fit the text without horizontally scrolling. As an author, my intent is that the content be easily readable to all readers. I don’t see why I should want or get to dictate the layout and aesthetics to my readers.

lolinder 6y ago
What's a feature in one context can be a bug in another. I get where OP is coming from: when I zoom in and the text reflows, it's easy to lose my place. PDFs don't have that problem. Also, digital, free-flow media lose basically all sense of space. PDFs are much better for finding a piece of content again later, because I can remember the location on the page and roughly how many pages into the document.
- Gehinnn 6y ago
  Usually, if you have reflow, you can disable it. However, if you don't have reflow, you cannot usually enable it!
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    Opera does better, or at least it used to.
  - dredmorbius 6y ago
    Many PDF readers / eBook readers now at least try to reflow PDFs. This often works, though it often doesn't. Though too be fair, reflowing HTML / displaying it without all the added-on cruft also often fails these days. Tools such as Reader Mode make heroic efforts, but also very frequently fail (or are apparently blocked or have sites blacklisted by tools).
- 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

cryptoz 6y ago

I have the opposite experience. To me, opening a PDF puts me on edge. My computer is likely to slow to a crawl. It never renders correctly - sometimes it will slowly render each page, one at a time, flashing the screen as it goes. Or maybe the PDF is using some features that my reader doesn't support so it renders incomplete and incorrectly. Links are often hard to pick out. What is a link and what isn't? What happens when I click on something, is it going to stay in the PDF or open a browser or something? Don't get me started on moving around in PDFs. There are always 2 sets of page numbers, one for the PDF and one of the document. Extremely confusing. Searching. Ugh, searching a PDF is a nightmare I don't want to even think about right now. Ctrl+F is broken 99% of the time. Or at least, that's my experience over the last 20 years. Sure, it's gotten better recently, but, not enough to make my mind 'at ease' exactly. Very stressful to open a PDF still, usually.

chmod775 6y ago
> To me, opening a PDF puts me on edge. My computer is likely to slow to a crawl. It never renders correctly - sometimes it will slowly render each page, one at a time, flashing the screen as it goes. That probably isn't the fault of the PDF, but the PDF reader you're using. > Searching. Ugh, searching a PDF is a nightmare I don't want to even think about right now. Ctrl+F is broken 99% of the time. Now this is actually the fault of PDF and how it does positioning of stuff within it - but about 50% of the blame lies with whichever software generated a shit PDF.
- LordDragonfang 6y ago
  >Now this is actually the fault of PDF and how it does positioning of stuff within it - but about 50% of the blame lies with whichever software generated a shit PDF. Arguably, it's still the fault of the horribly overcomplicated pdf spec -- html manages to do it just fine, with a plain text format, to boot
  - kaba0 6y ago
    Well, it’s an interesting competition, but I believe HTML(+CSS to be fair) would win the complexity of the spec price hands down.

bqmjjx0kac 6y ago

I don't have much experience with PDF as a spec, but I guess I'm a "PDF hater." It's the things that didn't need to be PDFs, but inexplicably are, that annoy me. Like data dumps from local governments that could have been machine-readable, or announcements that are distributed in print and emailed as PDFs, rather than lifting the content into the message body.

BostonEnginerd 6y ago
Our city council posts PDF files which consist of scans of documents someone printed out. Sometimes they turn on OCR, but not often.
axiolite 6y ago
> data dumps from local governments that could have been machine-readable, or announcements that are distributed in print and emailed as PDFs, rather than lifting the content into the message body. You should thank PDF for giving you any useful electronic copies at all. If it's scanned-in papers, sticking them loosly in an e-mail or web page would be much more difficult to read through. If it's text data, then perhaps it was primarily composed to be printed, and PDF allows easy creation of readable electronic copies with minimum of effort from any input. Before PDF you might have gotten nothing at all, because most people don't have readers for various obscure proprietary input formats. And PDF is far easier than other formats to convert into another format for your own consumption. Do you have a command-line tool which will extract the embedded images out of a Microsoft Word document? Or one that will convert it to plain text, preserving formatting? pdfimages and pdftotext -layout are very widely available.
- Aeolun 6y ago
  > You should thank PDF for giving you any useful electronic copies at all. I think the point is that data dumps in PDF format are not useful at all. I take objection to your statement that it’s easier to convert. The only reason there are so many tools to do so is because it’s so hard/impossible in the first place.
  - 6y ago

Lammy 6y ago

Also they can be justified in ways browsers can’t (yet) do. Every web page has a ragged right.

chmod775 6y ago
Like this (the demo at the top is interactive)? https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-align https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-align
- KMnO4 6y ago
  Interesting, there’s absolutely no difference between justify and align left on iOS Safari. I wouldn’t have guessed that’s an unsupported feature. I guess it’s not common enough for me to notice throughout the web.
  - abhinav22 6y ago
    Justify works in iOS Safari (I just checked). I like to use it in my designs sometimes :)
  - URSpider94 6y ago
    Works fine for me.
- Lammy 6y ago
  No, like ‘text-justify: inter-character’: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-justify https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/text-justif...
jimmygrapes 6y ago
I have been trying to place the justification format I have seen in some print books. In most cases it will add spaces between words to make up for sentences with words that can't be split easily, but it also doesn't fully right-justify the last letter of the line. It seems to be something like "add inter-word spacing unless spacing exceeds X"

tambourine_man 6y ago

Copy/pasting can be infuriating though. The web is catching up fast however, but at least I can view source/inspect.

yawaworht1978 6y ago

Furthermore, even on mobile devices, everything just work. Ctrl+f is non invasive, if I close the document in the middle of 100s of pages and reopen the document, I do not need to scroll, unlike many web apps it preserves the scroll location. It does what it needs to do without any hiccups.

tomjen3 6y ago

As I discovered by accident fonts are not automatically embedded in PDFs. PDFs are great when you want to read them on a large enough screen. They are not great on a Kindle or a phone. I wish there was a way to have several different layouts in one PDF file, so you could have the same content but with different layouts and then your device could select the most appropriate one.

jtbayly 6y ago
Do you know if it would be possible to get the same font(s) used on the webpage also used in the PDF?
- tomjen3 6y ago
  I don't see why not, the other way is more difficult as a PDF might only have the part of the font it uses embedded.

qbasic_forever 6y ago

The typesetting is better because PDF documents don't have to flow and resize across screens. This means a post-processing step can tweak hypenation, letter spacing, etc. to give the whole document a pleasing look. On the web it's a lot more difficult, but not impossible, to do the same and work on every possible size screen. There's also growing work to make typesetting style hyphenation and such work in browsers in the near future: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/hyphens

tyingq 6y ago

"It’s perhaps how static it is and it won’t change on me." You might be surprised that's not always true. https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/FreeStuff/PDFSamples/JavaScriptClock.pdf https://www.pdfscripting.com/public/FreeStuff/PDFSamples/Jav...

jwr 6y ago

The great thing about PDFs is that you can open huge documents and page through them quickly. I feel this is under-appreciated in today's world, where scrolling is being forced on us everywhere. Scrolling sucks for reading text. Every time you scroll, you have to pay attention to how much you scrolled, and then find your place in the text again. As for paging speed, just try using GoodReader or PDF Expert on an iPad. I can flip through thousand-page manuals and datasheets as quickly as if it were a paper book. And a 12" iPad shows an entire A4 page without the need for zooming and panning. In my experience, people who dislike reading PDFs have only tried doing so in Acrobat Reader (which is hot garbage, and slow), on a small screen that is wider than it is tall, zoomed in so that only half a page is being shown. That is a sub-par experience indeed.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Be it pdfs or html, I find my place through chapters, rather than pages.
- pvorb 6y ago
  Haven't you ever been forced to stop reading in the middle of a chapter? It happens to me all the time.
  - BlueTemplar 6y ago
    Depends what you mean. Temporary interruptions yes. But then the location is kept. Interruptions for a very long time ? I might have to reread the whole chapter anyway...
Thrymr 6y ago
> I feel this is under-appreciated in today's world, where scrolling is being forced on us everywhere. Scrolling sucks for reading text. Every time you scroll, you have to pay attention to how much you scrolled, and then find your place in the text again. This is incredibly important, and something that dedicated book readers like Kindles get right, but I've never seen done well in long web pages. Discrete "pages" (that correspond to "screens") make it much easier to find your place as you go to the next page. Note that multipart web pages often have you scroll through each "page" separately, and give you the worst of both worlds. Sure, PDF isn't always best for reading on a computer or phone screen, but infinite scrolling is annoying too.

michaelgrafl 6y ago

First thing I do when opening a Word document at work is converting it to PDF and reopen it in Sumatra Reader. It just feels a lot better to me. It opens faster, it opens at the position I left it at, zooming in and out is fast, scrolling is smoother, and even if I wanted to, I couldn't modify it on accident. It just feels a lot more reified than something that is responsive or editable. Not great for mobile, but that's not what I care for at work.

agumonkey 6y ago

I've been obsessed with dynamicity and having everything adaptable.. but yeah static stuff have this weird feeling of 'right'.

crazygringo 6y ago

I know! The first thing I do with an .epub or .mobi is convert it to PDF. That way, I can read it and feel my "place", highlight passages that get saved in the file (not my reader application), and annotate in margins, circle big sections, etc. I feel like the annotation abilities of PDF's get ignored, but they're HUGE.

Epitom3 6y ago
> The first thing I do with an .epub or .mobi is convert it to PDF. b r u h
bscphil 6y ago
Same here. It helps to have a solid PDF viewer (I use Okular), but what's also really underappreciated is the vastly better typography in PDFs. I suppose it depends partly on the viewer, but epubs tend to be hot garbage to look at. Fortunately ebook-convert (from the Calibre project) generates great looking PDFs and lets you set a bunch of options like fonts and so on. This is especially important if I'm on mobile, because I can create an easily readable PDF in portrait mode that works great with the Android default PDF reader, whereas the obvious choice to open epubs (Google Books) is terrible: it's slow and battery heavy, and requires you to upload the epub so that it can be converted into the native format. (Once the conversion process choked and I somehow ended up with a 1 GB file.)

Black101 6y ago

Wouldn't an SVG be better, then?

akerr 6y ago

PDFs are designed to be printed and HTML tends to be overrun by ads. The former is nicer for reading and the latter is nicer still with ad-blocking, reader mode and/or a tasteful design.

tester89 6y ago

I mean I dislike PDFs for the exact reasons you cite, they don't reflow and fonts are embedded and chosen by the creator. Occasionally these choices can be good, but often I want to resize the text-size to make reading more comfortable which is easy with HTML or an EPUB, but with PDF I can only zoom so much before I must pan to actually read the entire line. Similarly, I think that the creator's font choice is often the wrong choice, it's very common for me to change fonts on an EPUB, but I can't do that for a PDF which is frustrating.

ksec 6y ago

It is funny this is being upvoted as the top comment on HN, last time something similar was said, HN were piling in how awful PDF is and HTML is going to take over the world of publishing along with the coming death of PDF. >Haters of PDFs do not understand the human aspects of it Unfortunately UX is not something HN audience or Tech in general are good at. ( Apart from Apple )