Hacker News Reader

This site is pretty great. I would love to re-learn some of the basics in this format.

Here are some previous discussions since this content has hit the front page a couple of times:

* 5 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8472157

* 7 years ago - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4807091

i was gonna say the website design is weird(why pdfs to download instead of pngs?) but considering it's 7 years old it's held up well

Oh that could be why the font isn't the most readable either.

I have no affiliation with the author and this is the first I'm seeing the content, but I'd guess its's because PDFs can be vector-scalable and never lose their quality as you scale up/down and PNGs cannot.

And they can be printed.

You can print a png

Sure you can. But it isn't nearly as certain to generate the same kind of output when changing printers; platforms or programs. PDF at least does that part well and I totally support the authors choice and think .png would be a terrible format for this.

They're meant to be posters, pdf is entirely appropriate.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com