Monday, December 08, 2003

I strongly dislike Adobe PDF

It's bloated. It's slow. It sucks up bandwidth. It makes my machine slow and cranky. It has a bad extra navigation bar in the in-browser version.

Too many sites seem to think that the ease of posting a PDF to a website in lieu of converting it to a much more streamlined HTML format, is worth the trade-offs. More and more I think that anything in PDF is just not worth reading (Tax forms excepted).

In a vain attempt to rid myself of about 1/2 of these complaints, I've installed the newest ghostscript/ghostview, and I'm going to see if my woes go away.

Wish me luck! (Or point out a better, light-weight, small footprint, PDF viewer. Because Adobe Acrobat Reader 5 sucks, and 6 sucks even more.)

rant

Comments [5] |

Monday, December 08, 2003 11:37:00 AM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I think PDF is useful when you need a specifically formatted document - particularly with input (like tax forms). Also converting things like highly formatted word documents or adobe pagemaker-type documents. HTML is not very fun to format something that specifically.

Doug

Monday, December 08, 2003 12:47:09 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

I think the key is that PDFs should only be used when the formatting needs to be 100% duplicated to communicate effectively. If the same information can be communicated in a different format that fits the web medium better, it should be.

IE: Tax Forms should be in PDF, Washington Post's Express should not be.

Kearns

Monday, December 08, 2003 1:48:29 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

There's another issue involved with PDF's, though. Accessibility. A lot of people don't realize that posting a lot data in PDF format ONLY prevents people with certain disabilities to view their content.

I mention this because one of my primary tasks at my job (government contracting) is making sites Section 508 compliant.

While you can make PDF's partially compliant and usable, for publications such as the Post Express and company newsletters, it's really a bad solution.

Scott

Monday, December 08, 2003 3:56:28 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Working for the Govmnt, we have to make stuff 508 complaint, except for some reason, we are almost allowed to throw 508 compliance out the winder when it comes to PDF. The latest FEHB application has taken this largely into account. The content is provided by the actual health care providers in PDF format, but lately there has been a drive to force these providers to give us a copy of the PDF and Html doc, or we will charge them to convert the doc to HTML. So Kearns, there you have it, the Gov is driving for a cause that you can get behind before many other more tech savvy industries actually are. Is the apocalypse nearing?

Speaking as the top Name (out of an arbitrary 15 people) in Simulation Auto Racing (named July 1997).

Alex

Monday, December 08, 2003 3:57:44 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)

Yeah, thats supposed to be "compliant"

Speaking as the top Name (out of an arbitrary 15 people) in Simulation Auto Racing (named July 1997).

Alex

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