3 ms·

An HTML version for web viewing, a PDF for printing.

• lockhouse 3y ago
  That's double work, especially considering that browsers have built-in native PDF viewers these days.
  • presbyterian 3y ago
    It’s not double work, it’s the proper amount of work to do the task you (should) want to do: share information in an accessible way. Also, there are a billion different ways you can create decent HTML and a PDF from one source.
    • DANmode 3y ago
      The "Save" dialog in any browser, is a good example.
      • lockhouse 3y ago
        Save results in the often terrible browser printed output.
      • presbyterian 3y ago
        They're saying that because browsers render the HTML/CSS differently, the prints wouldn't look good. I don't think this is necessarily true, but even if it is, CSS lets you style the print version of a page directly so that the print looks good, and you can even make it look like a normal document and not a printed web page
• Modified3019 3y ago
  PDFs allow for easy and portable saving, sharing, and generally also searching, all in a single file that will always have a consistent presentation. Reasons not to use HTML - HTML files generally have load of external calls to css and javascript that don't allow for making clean single files as is. - Reality has proven that webdev will not to put effort into making saving pages cleanly viable. Expecting otherwise is fragile thinking - Even if you go above and beyond the standard user and use a browser addon for saving webpages as a single file, this doesn't always work out as formatting generally becomes fucked in some way, sometimes severely. - Often straight up a mandated requirement. - HMTL links will always rot, but a government document faxed, photocopied, faxed again, and scanned into a PDF file spread haphazardly across a dozen university and legal archives is forever Summarizing the results of some government project is a perfect use case for PDFs.