User Centered

I agree, PDFs are overused on websites. Content that need not be placed into Portable Document Format is and it's annoying, all of a sudden I'm loading a PDF, my system lags out because Adobe Acrobat eats more resources than AOL or something.

That said, PDF is a very important file format. When sending files to a print agency I've found it is the most reliable for ensuring what we send gets printed like we see it on our screen... and that transfers to other users in this way.

It works the same for printable online posters. I can think of no file format which is as simple for the user and creator to allow the consistently formatted printing of 'online' material.

Also, Tax forms, definitely have to be correctly formatted. My taxes are confusing enough to me that I prefer to print it out, fill out the document and I don't think the IRS would appreciate a personalized version of their form. That'd get me a happy little audit (insert sarcasm).

Simply put, there is no great technical knowledge required to create a PDF while creating a web page that prints almost always exactly the same in every web browser would take some serious technical knowledge (and I still think it wouldn't print the same).

For true online content, yeah, they are totally overused but it is certainly a valid information format.

Yum

You bring up some good uses for PDF, a shorter list, unfortunately, than most people seem to have.

Dan writes:

I find PDF to be an invaluable tool, especially Acrobat Standard. As an engineering consultant, I do work in many programs: AutoCAD, Microstation, Visio, modeling software, as well as the traditional Office suite. Trouble is, the clients rarely have all of those programs (or the correct version), nor do we want to give them versions that they can edit and otherwise manipulate. They pay us to give them a finished and polished report or plans, and it's very easy to simply "Print as PDF" and be assured that in almost all cases, they will see exactly the right thing at their end. And while not perfect, a well-formatted PDF is able to be copy and pasted, and searched.

We also appreciate it when a vendor has their brochures and product info sheets in PDF, as this allows us to easily save the information to our local server, or in the project folder, for easy access. In the same way, I often use it to archive online articles from news websites or even blogs so that I can save them and read them later. Again, I use the "Print as PDF" because it always saves it *exactly* as I see it on the screen (something "save webpage" or "work offline" has never done). Basically, I use it as a substitute for paper and printing whenever practical.

Thank you Dan. For my purposes, PDF sucks. But I know there may be some valid uses of it, as you have brought to light.

My post is provocative on purpose, to try to arouse some discussion of the PDF problems and benefits.

I really appreciate your taking the time to enlighten us on some valid applications of PDF usage.

But I still find the inability to copy and paste content from a PDF file to other applications to be a big negative. Perhaps there is a workaround for this task that I'm not aware of.

When I print out PDF files of market research or white papers, I hate how the cover page sucks up so much toner due to solid color coverage. Too many times I detect grandiosity and even laziness to be involved.

There is a Google white paper on API usability testing that, good as it is, prints out in huge type, a sentence per page. Perhaps I could have done something to reduce the size of the letters.

I suspect in many cases a slide show was just dumped into a PDF file, and that is how the information exists. Slide shows suck as print outs. I also don't like PowerPoint, but that's a topic for another post.

;^)

Hm. You can copy text out of a PDF, however, Adobe seems to have to know it is text. By default the 'translators' I've seen to convert Word Documents to PDF don't seem to do this.

In some PDFs you can input and save data (I do believe I've seen some tax forms do this).

Yum

Here's the flip side of Dan's argument:
http://my.opera.com/usability/blog/show.dml/201301

Like all technolgies, you have the tendency to be misuse it, but it can be very powerful and useful when used appropriately. I think the big difference between Dan's and my point of view is that Dan (for lack of a better word) the "invoker" of the pdf. He's actually creating it because it's his preferred viewing medium. In my case (link above), I seldom want to keep these brochures and white papers around... The pdf's are "forced" onto me.

...of course, Dan says he prefers those as well. Again- sometimes it's appropriate and sometimes it's just lazy.

Anonymous writes:

Dan said: "a well-formatted PDF is able to be copy and pasted, and searched."

How????

Dan writes:

To Vaspers88 and the Anonymous User -

I get the Standard and Free versions confused as to which features are on which, but I know for sure that on the Free version, any document that has been printed (i.e., "print as PDF") retains the text for searching. You just have to click the binoculars in the toolbar (or probably Ctrl-F works too). As far as copy and paste, mine allows you to enter a "select" mode (again, look for it on the toolbar) which turns on a familar "I" cursor that you can use to highlight text. Any highlighted text can then be copied and pasted into another program. Formatting doesn't normally copy over, but you can definitely grab the text, columns or tables for use in spreadsheets, and pictures.

One example where this won't work is if you're working with a scanned document. Then you need to use OCR, which I think is only included on the Standard version. It's not great, but I'd say it works just as well as any other OCR application.

By the way, I don't disagree with the other arguments here, like how some PDF's are just badly formatted, or unnecessary. I'm just trying to point out some counterexamples. In the case of colorful cover sheets, I've definitely seen more than a few cases where companies have simply uploaded whatever files they use for their own marketing departments (to print out fancy glossy brochures). That does seem a bit lazy, but look at it the other way. Now, instead of needing an entire filing cabinet devoted to the actual brochures of all the vendors we do business with, we just have an archive on our servers of all of that info. It's a pain to print out, but I just use it for reference and, at most, print out the back page that has all the specs I need to show my boss.

PDF should be an extension of an existing source of information, rather than the source itself.

I often find myself in the situation in which I save a page as HTML and then manually edit it in Word in order to create a printable version that uses the space of an A4 sheet in an optimal way. Most often this process takes a lot of time.

It would be great if the pages that are most likely to be printed by readers were also available as a downloadable PDF.