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Comment by smoe | Hacker News Reader

> 4. Stuffed with fluff. PDFs tend to lack real substance, compared to regular web pages.

The exact opposite is the case in my experience. Unfortunately the actual substance is often in a PDF and all the web pages pointing to it are superficial, copy and pasted and/or clickbaity fluff.

They then go on about how in web sites the content can be better structured and navigated. Unless I'm misunderstanding the word in English, what has that to do with whether the content has substance?

> [...] This leads to overwhelmingly long and inane PDFs

You mean something akin to a book?

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Couldn't agree more! I've yet to see a PDF that has animated ads, pops up a subscribe-to-our-newsletter modal halfway through, or even autoplays video a few seconds after you've started reading it.

I mean I suppose you could do all that with embedded JS, in theory, but one of the nice things about PDF is it mostly works absolutely fine with scripts turned off.

I've seen web based documentation that is infinitely worse than the 200 page PDF your bank in the EU will give you to implement SEPA integration.

That stuff is thorough as hell and you even get schema definitions for all of it.

I'd pick that over poorly explained or 'discoverable' alternatives.

They also wrote:

> and boring to read.

Not only is that subjective, but how is that relevant?

Neilsen group has clearly chosen their opinion and then found evidence that supports it. It is a shame too. If they discarded their bias, maybe they could take some of the real problem points about PDFs and make a solid persuasive argument why we should try to fix those problems.

yeah I want to see what internet the author is browsing because for the last 5 years all I could see if vacuum on the web. headers footer side-ads privacy-popups massive-intro-photo and somewhere lost in all of this, a paragraph. Quite often the content could fit in a tweet.

> The exact opposite is the case in my experience. Unfortunately the actual substance is often in a PDF and all the web pages pointing to it are superficial, copy and pasted and/or clickbaity fluff.

That's entirely cultural crap, and has little to do with either format. Or do you think that this HN comments page would be better distributed in PDF form?

I'm not saying one format is better than the other, or it having to do anything with the format.

The word "Unfortunately" is there on purpose. I often have to sift trough PDFs were it doesn't make sense to have the information only there.

What I'm disagreeing with is that PDFs unlike web pages lack substance. In my opinion the substance is often in the PDFs not because of the format, but how the information is produced.

E.g. within a government or enterprise the content could come from anywhere within the org structure, often multiple intermediaries away from the people putting stuff on the website. Everyone knows basic MS Word. On-boarding potentially hundreds or thousands of employees to a CMS and send them to a "how to craft effective digital content" which is what the Nielson article is ultimately selling is not always feasible. Only select pieces get a web treatment the rest gets summarized if not just linked. News papers have pipelines from Word to digital publishing tools to print / online because of this. But also this setup is not easy.

I just recently needed some specific information about traveling to and quarantine in Switzerland. The news sites where useless, the linked government web page was useless. Only the original PDF at the end of the link chain contained the information.

I'd prefer having this information more easily accessible/searchable. But as it stands, the substance is often in the PDFs, not the web pages.

Like the authors, I find that content published as a PDF is often extremely verbose, almost like the authors are paid by the page.

Government reports, or those prepared by consultants, are often the worst offenders.

I had a capstone project in university where the clearest way to generate a better grade was to generate more pages.

We put all sorts of rubbish in the report to make sure it made a "thunk" sound when we handed it in. It was nearly 300 pages when it should have been 90.

The problem is, plenty will judge a report on its thickness. "It is thick, so it must be comprehensive." What percent of government reports are read cover to cover and what percentage are just ctrl+f through?

If reports are often ctrl-F'd through for relevant information, it seems likely that many people consuming it are reading far fewer than 90 pages in total - and wouldn't have read the full shorter report.

Perhaps it is better to be comprehensive in government reports than concise, to accommodate a variety of readers who want to drill into different aspects of the report.

(Of course, a PDF may not be the best structure for this! A well-formatted HTML reference with appropriate hyperlinks may be much more useful.)

Yeah, but who is actually going to read a 7000 page report on torture or surveillance? (Assuming these reports were actually published, which they were not)

Or a PDF document with a table of contents. Look at this clickable beauty containing a wealth of information in tidy categories:

http://media.metro.net/about_us/vision-2028/report_metro_vis...

I ran into a similar situation, but decided to submit a short report anyhow. It earned one of my best grades in university. When I asked about the grade, since I ignored multiple guidelines, the response was that I said a lot more than most people even though I wrote less. It probably had something to do with my admiration of concise writing. It is something that I wish that I could accomplish more often.

Good for your professor. I always refused to impose length requirements, but I would say what a typical length for the assignment would be (always in number of words, never “pages”). If you did the job in significantly fewer words, that earned you extra points. If you went long, but every word counted, you also got extra points. But any padding, wasting my time with unnecessary words, meant a penalty.

Honestly, that's just silly. If they'd use html instead of pdf, you'd still have the same content. pdf is a format. It has nothing to do with the content.

The constraints and expectations of the medium strongly influence the content.

If I had an idea and wanted to communicate it, then I did so by recorded video, by live video, by blog post, by Twitter thread, and by HN comment, the same idea would be presented in very different ways.

In the same way, a writer who publishes something by HTML (blog post, etc.) will produce a very different document than if they intend to publish it by PDF (ebook, etc.). They tailor their message to the constraint and expectations of the medium.

If we used html instead of pdf the whole society would collapse.

Didn't anyone notice that it's basically impossible to save an html page today and have it load and render correctly and offline tomorrow?

Perfect fidelity isn't there but all popular browsers have a "save page" functionality which seems to work really well.

That's exactly what the parent is criticizing. The problem with save page is that the HTML you save still contains tons of links to server resources, particularly CSS and JS. Of course those links will work if you look at the saved page immediately after you save it. The problem is that if you come back later, sometimes even just the next day, they no longer work. A lot of JS file names are auto-generated random numbers, produced by packaging systems rather than humans, which change whenever the developers edit their JS. They aren't designed to be stable.

There are tools that try to fetch those links and update the HTML to point to the local copy. But those tools can only go so far. JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it.

> JS is allowed to fetch new files dynamically, and there's no reliable way to look at a piece of code and automatically figure out what it's going to fetch when you run it.

You've diverged from the context and are no longer doing an apples-to-apples comparison. The things you're describing are all opt-in and amount to having to deal with an adversarial input. There's nothing inherent to the medium that requires those things.

In other words, a person publishing a PDF is already abstaining from certain things. (Namely, the sorts of things you're bringing up that would make for a pathological case.) If the person who publishes a PDF does a straightforward translation into a web page, then you end up with something that doesn't exhibit any of the downsides you're discussing.

Good point, and also relevant user name :)

No, but the medium allows these things. And that's a problem.

No, most browsers will save the resources as well and rewrite the HTML to reference them. You can have problems with dynamically loaded things but I have found that it works very well in practice. I have had maybe one page that was significantly broken saving from Firefox over the years.

Thanks dude, it's nice to see that there still arr people that can read a text and understand the point.

I've found the best way to save a page on a browser is to print it ... to PDF.

it's quite nice this way. much better than the old .mht file even. it skips the junk.

Absolutely, depending on how much I care about the content, I either print it directly from the reader mode (which gives pretty bland results) or I touch up the page itself with things like "column-count: 2" and a few changes to headlines, to give it the look of a proper print article. Either way, printing to PDFs is a great way to archive/save web content for later.

This is brilliant... I hadn't thought about it.

SingleFile can do it.

I've put together a small tool that, using *.har files, by accident also does this[0], but it only works for simple sites like Wikipedia.

[0] https://github.com/Tade0/emergency-poncho

It's funny that you mention wikipedia, since one of my favorite wikipedia features is the "download as PDF" link, by which you can obtain any article in a beautiful and readable form.

Not all html pages - what about hackernews? It's mostly tables with minimal CSS (a bit of padding and font*/color), I bet it continues to be perfectly rendered practically indefinitely. At least snapshots on archive.org from 2007 still look perfect.

In Gov't or consulting reports the content tends to start somewhere around page 20-30.

Content is often written to a predefined length, no matter how it is going to be published. E.g. some news papers even if there is no print version anymore still decide how long a story is going to be upfront. And food bloggers, will fluff up an basic oatmeal recipe with 3 pages worth of childhood stories before getting to the point.

Even if verbose, those PDF are often still the only place where the relevant substance is together. The websites referring to them then cherry pick from it. I spend a whole lot of time sifting trough goverment PDFs over the last couple months because it was the only way to get to the information I needed.

It would be much easier if the content were available in different formats.

I think that's less on the format and more on the intent. For reports and what is traditionally viewed as "written form", reader is expected to have high tolerance for length and boilerplate.

I see it as the pendant of the "younger generations can't read anymore" critic, where lenghty, rambling and diluted prose is becoming harder and harder to parse and focus on.

On the other side page load speed and attention grabbing metrics are thoroughly studied for web pages and people value terseness, to the point of loathing click baits and endless listicles.

Have you ever visited https://arxiv.org/?

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