Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

Comment by chipotle_coyote | Hacker News Reader

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chipotle_coyote

> What I don't get is the suggestion that PDF should be replaced by HTML. The purposes of the two formats are basically orthogonal and replacing one with the other is doomed to failure.

Isn't "the purposes of the two formats are basically orthogonal" actually the entire point the article is making? Literally the first line of the summary:

> Research spanning 20 years proves PDFs are problematic for online reading. Yet they’re still prevalent and users continue to get lost in them.

From the second paragraph:

> The [PDF] format is intended and optimized for print. It’s inherently inaccessible, unpleasant to read, and cumbersome to navigate online.

The bolded statement in the second paragraph that's clearly meant to be the One Important Thing to Take Away:

> Do not use PDFs to present digital content that could and should otherwise be a web page.

Your comment here is eloquent, but the article's argument is not "print-layout documents should be replaced by hypertext," it's "print-layout documents are a poor fit for reading on screen-layout devices." When you conclude:

> It's all a matter of opinion over whether you prefer print-format documents or hypertext, and that's going to be very application-specific.

Aren't you essentially restating the article's thesis?

I don't want to read an article online that's a PDF for largely the same reason that I don't want to print the web version of the same article rather than a PDF. It's generally going to be clunky. The print page size and dimensions are not going to be my screen/window size and dimensions. I certainly don't want to read two- or three-column text on screen, which may require zooming in and out and scrolling back and forth on the same "print" page. And God help me if I'm trying to do that on my phone or iPad mini.

The article isn't saying "PDF is terrible and nobody should ever use it"; it's saying "PDFs were meant for specific applications and in nearly all circumstances, online reading is not it."

People who use PDFs generally do it because they want to have a fixed layout. If you tell those people to use HTML, they'll find a way to produce a non-reflowable webpage.

Or they use them because they have a publishing flow implemented somewhere in the byzantine processes of their company that spits out a nice looking pdf at the end (and maybe a crappy looking 1999 html document)

That's actually been more my experience, yes. :)

People who use PDFs often do it because the content they use it for is of a type (often a series) that has long been produced in PDF, and the reasoning for that in many cases is because in the 1990s people would print it out and read it. In many cases, that's not how people use it now, but PDF is still used because that's the way it has always been done.

I use PDFs for engineering drawings of mechanical parts. It's been done for a long time and is a good fit. There's a specific sheet format and scale, and is meant to be able to be printed easily

...although you need to beware of printouts getting silently scaled. It's really common, when someone asks to print (e.g.) an A4-sized PDF to A4 paper, for the printer driver to rescale it so that the entire document (including margins) fits within the (slightly smaller) printable area of the device. "Shrink to fit [within printable area]" seems to be a common default setting.

(If you're using PDFs for precisely-scaled engineering drawings, I expect you're well aware of this and have a workflow that avoids scaling, but I see people trip over it all too often.)

> I use PDFs for engineering drawings of mechanical parts. It's been done for a long time and is a good fit.

Good for you, but that doesn't change that most of the uses of PDF on the web aren't for applications like that.

Granted, but a surprising number of people (still, in 2020) envision a very static, print-like experience for all web pages. i.e. yes, they "want" a fixed layout but in many cases their reasoning is mis- or uninformed.

They use PDFs because of five monkeys experiment.

This experiment, which apparently never happened [0], just means 'because tradition'.

[0] http://www.throwcase.com/2014/12/21/that-five-monkeys-and-a-...

Serious documents are traditionally published in pdf format, that's why they are published in pdf format.

”> The [PDF] format is intended and optimized for print. It’s inherently inaccessible, unpleasant to read, and cumbersome to navigate online.”

PDF format is perfectly capable of holding structured text and other machine-readable/accessibility data, alongside the print-ready representation. Ask the developers of document authoring tools (starting with MS Office) and the various PDF generation libraries why they don’t include all that data as standard.

One can argue the appropriateness of a print-derived format in a constantly fluid digital world, but it does what it was designed to do and does it pretty well, and it could provide a lot more if developers and users could be bothered to do it.

And yes, HTML is its own exercise in awfulness that is equally bad at everything. I’d rather set my feet on fire that propagate that horror further.

Honestly, what we really need is a 21st-century Donald Knuth. I only wish she’d hurry up.

The use of PDF's is usually for it's immutability. Not all PDF's are created equal. Some are harder to change than others - but there are many tools and options to change them, if you need to.

However, it is possible to turn HTML5 into statement-of-record documents (Not PDF's),and make them immutable, encrypted and authenticated. A HTML5 document can have the features we need from PDF (immutability, encryption, authentication, pixel perfect print, etc.) while still allowing the resulting document to be interactive and responsive (work well mobile & web) in nature.

Effectively the best of both worlds.

Tagged PDFs that allow reflow have existed for at least 8 years

Properly tagging a PDF involves marking up literally every element in the document in a similar way that you'd mark up that document in HTML (e.g., everything must be described semantically; the tags are really designed for accessibility reasons and for helping screen readers). Sometimes it might be the right choice, but this doesn't change my basic argument: if the final destination of your document is intended to be a web site, then HTML is almost always the right delivery format.

interesting. what's that format / feature called?

It's called just that: Tagged PDF. It was added to the ISO spec quite some time ago and allows you to annotate your documents structurally.

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