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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 scrollin
by 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 agoBe it pdfs or html, I find my place through chapters, rather than pages.
- pvorb 6y agoHaven't you ever been forced to stop reading in the middle of a chapter? It happens to me all the time.
- BlueTemplar 6y agoDepends 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.
- rainonmoon 6y agoAnchor tags have existed in HTML for thousands of years.
- john-doe 6y ago1992 to be precise! I actually made a minimal SSG based on them: https://portable.fyi/#2020-11-27-this-blog-is-a-single-html-file https://portable.fyi/#2020-11-27-this-blog-is-a-single-html-... Printing this page to PDF outputs the whole website, one post per page.