Saturday, March 25, 2006

Pet peeve of the moment: gratuitous PDFing

It is perfectly reasonable to make a PDF when it is essential that you preserve the physical appearance of the document, like if it's a form to be filled out and mailed in, or sheet music, or camera-ready copy, or a situation where the arrangement of elements on a page is absolutely essential.

But it is absolutely ridiculous to make a PDF when you're just posting textual information on your website for average website readers to peruse. A PDF you have to download and wait for it to open, and if you have a particularly fussy computer that might affect your multitasking, and the search function isn't nearly as user-friendly as the web browser search function. This is especially annoying if you don't know if the PDF will contain the information you're looking for, and have to wait for it to load and use the unfriendly search function only to find that you didn't need it after all. PDF format simply does nothing to make things easier for the user, but can contribute greatly to making things more annoying for the user.

So if you're posting information that can be expressed in plain and simple text, and there's no usability reason why page layout is important, just post it as part of your HTML document. If you really feel it's necessary to have a PDF available, you can post a link to the PDF on the HTML page. But don't just post a PDF instead of an HTML document. It's really not helping anyone.

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