Sunspace I DISlike how people use PDFs on the web…
To force the web user to adopt your page-layout choices rather than your document adapting to the user’s choices is very impolite.
Agreed. Now that I think of it, people who put frames on their website without the “NoFrames” option are almost as bad.
iwakura43 You can set it so it doesn’t do that–so it scrolls smoothly. Sorry I can’t remember how, but I bet it’s in the file > preferences / options / something like that window. Open a PDF in acrobat reader itself, not within a browser window, so you can get at that option.
Gee, you’d think the clowns that wrote Acrobat would make a feature like that easy to find. Jerks !!!
Now that I think of it, anyone ever go to a commercial website that has their *entire catalog * on pdf ? Oh ain’t that just a barrel of fun huh? Nothing like going through a 500 page online tome that’s printed in telephone book style just so you can order a box of pencils. Basically, I have never ordered from any company that does that. (Mainly because I could not find what I wanted anyway - Acrobat being what it is). I think I’ll start E-Mailing such companies and tell them that because they were too lazy to make an appealing, easy-to-use site, they are probably losing a lot of business and not just mine.
Good
Pdfs are useful if you’re working with different languages: you can always print out the document on any printer, no extra fonts or drivers needed.
I work in media, and that’s pdf’s main advantage: no matter what you put on the page, the other person can see it if Person has Acrobat.
Acrobat Professional also allows you to paste comments on pdfs, which is useful if you have to add corrections or comments to PPTs, etc.
Bad
All in all, pdfs are a decent medium by which to perform work, but they are pretty crappy as a final interface. As has been pointed out, the scrolling is herky-jerky, and I find them generally pretty hard to read on the screen. If you use the comments in Acro-Pro, they often have “ghosts” all over the place and do not scroll well with their respective pages.
Historically, this has been very much the case. But while I don’t know that PS viewers for Windows have become more common, OpenOffice has become much, much better at dealing with M$ formats.
However, PDF is the best general solution to the problem of preserving and transmitting documents electronically. And that is just sad.
My problem with PDFs are all related to using them as they were not intended to be used: As a way to preserve documents you can read online, instead of in hardcopy.
[ul]
[li]They are clunky and unresponsive, like paper itself. []They are arbitrarily broken into pages, not concepts. []There’s no such thing as a hyperlink, and that is a fatal flaw in anything you do not expect to print. (There are in some documents, and some even have a table of contents. Those are rare.) []You inevitably need to scroll within a page, not only up and down but side-to-side. This is horrible. []Fonts and sizes are not adjustable by the end-user. []You cannot select text within a document, or manipulate it in any other way. []They are larger than the equivalent text, and very often they would look and work much better as text, or possibly as HTML with inlined graphics.[/ul]In short, HTML is for browsing, PDFs are for printing.[/li]
(As a final note, Adobe may have invented the Portable Document Format, but they do not have a monopoly on PDF creators or viewers.)
I like them. If I send someone a spreadsheet full of data, they muck with it often without understanding it. Then it goes up the ladder and I get calls that start: “they say they got this data from you…” I send everything in pdf format, and I go ahead and lock it with a password. Then if someone questions my data, they’ll actually be questioning the original and not someone’s half-witted interpretation.
I loved PDFs for working with Psychology and Sociology papers. Print out 10-20 articles for 200-400 pages was nice with PDFs. Reading that much on a screen would have made my head explode. It’s nice having the paper copies to read. However, I hate the automatic updates and plug-in things… Loading time sucks on them.
Better, absolutely, but still fairly shitty. I have the latest version of OpenOffice, and still routinely open Word (and Powerpoint) files with the formatting all fucked up. Between all the different versions of Office, both Mac and PC, I think it’s amazing OpenOffice does as well as it does. But it’s not an acceptable general standard of document exchange for Unix people.
True. But it’s so rarely used by Windows people that one can’t mail out a Postscript file to Windows people and be sure that they’ll be able to figure out how to read it.
This is why PDF rocks so much. Technical papers full of symbols and equations, resumes, whatever – it always looks good, no matter what the platform.
Exactly. Granted, I tend to use Postscript files almost exclusively, but when I’m mailing documents to a Windows user, pdfs are a godsend, they really are.
I like pdfs when used properly. Frex, you can find the user manual for many home appliances online at the company’s website, stored as pdf files. Download them and read them and you’re on your way. Much easier than trying to keep all those old manuals for VCRs, TVs, remote controls, microwave ovens, etc in a safe, accessible place.
My browsers rarely do a good job of reading pdfs, so I save link target as to my hard drive, where they’re easy to read and easy to find.
The purpose of a PDF is to make widely accessible a document in the precise way in which it was created. For example, the content of a contract or the text of a law should not be changeable. Shipping something to a printer halfway across the continent that you created in Word Perfect 8.1 with proprietary graphics carefully placed where you want them for precise branding and marketing strategy, you want the printer to get just what you created, not what his Word 2000 program and image-translating software make of it.
PDF is not intended to be a way to transmit a document that someone will fill in or adapt to his/her own purposes, and idiots who use them as such should be taken out and shot. (This particularly means government bodies who produce PDFs of the forms they require to be filled out.)
But for formally transmitting a finalized document and ensuring that there are no changes made to it, PDF is a widely used and excellent way of achieving that result.
(Kinko’s, by the way, has their own proprietary variation on PDF, licensed from Adobe, and available from them gratis if you are a company intending to produce documents for printing and reproduction on their equipment.)
Ack. That fucking link brought up a QuickTime update box (which I refused because it said the software wasn’t on their server), a Netscape survey box (???) AND it crashed my Firefox browser.
I bet you keep that link around just to send to people you hate, don’t you.
I have a love/hate relationship with pdfs. On the one hand, when our customers send them in, it saves me a lot of time getting them to film over working with Quark (I hate hate hate Quark). On the other hand, if the customers need us to do anything other than output films, they become an incredible hassle, particularly if they include text, since it’s almost guaranteed that the creator of the document used one of the 5 billion fonts we don’t have, and then it’s impossible to convert the pdf to a different format properly. (We’re die engravers and often I have to convert text files to vectors in order to feed them to a CNC machine.) That’s not so much a problem with the format, of course, more with customers who don’t understand what embedded means.
The Portable Document Format (.pdf) is a tool, just like any other. I don’t complain when I see some experienced handyman using his hammer to fix things, but I’ll complain if some weekend warrior bashes a hole in something with his hammer. I don’t blame the tool, I blame the tool using the tool.
.pdf is a godsend, as several people have noted, for inter-platform communications. It prints well and looks exactly like it should no matter whose screen it is on. What gets me, and I suspect is the root of the OP’s gripe, is jerks who don’t use it right. Case in point, a single image of parking for theFort Worth Convention Center. What a freaking waste. One image suitable for the .gif format and a handful of lines of text. No mathematical symbols, no complex formatting. Bah. That was a poor use of the power, and overhead, of a .pdf document.
I’m sorry to join the people trying to turn a Pit rant into a debate, but I’m an Acrobat lover, so I gotta say a couple of things.
I saw several comments here about what was wrong with PDF that weren’t really true problems with the format.
You can actually select text in a PDF. A lot of people think you can’t, because Acrobat Reader gives you the Hand tool by default. If you switch to the Text Select tool, you’re on your way (unless the document has security turned on that keeps you from selecting).
The full version of Acrobat has a rarely-used feature called the Forms tool. It allows the creator of a PDF to define fields in which a Reader-user can enter their own information. The document can be printed out with the added stuff showing, or the data can be exported much the same way HTML form data is. I love this feature, and am constantly trying to get people to use it, but I seem to be in a small minority on this one. I can’t remember the last time I saw a forms-enabled PDF created by anyone but myself.
Acrobat also allows you to hyperlink to other parts of the same document, to any part of other PDFs, to any file accessible from the computer, or to the Web. This is another feature no one seems to use, but it is there.
I do agree that the format isn’t as smooth as I’d like. For instance, the forms feature isn’t as WYSIWYG as I’d like, and gives you very little control over the information’s appearance. I hope Adobe will eventually perfect the darn thing.
I believe the IRS has .pdf forms that you can fill in like that, Saltire. I know I did my 1040EZ with one this past year. But there the issue is that you must fill out the entire form in one sitting because it is impossible (at least as a Reader-only user) to save the content you enter into the form.
Speaking as one who has had to continually fight with printing companies about why the printed material doesn’t look like layout, PDFs saved me a lot of headache.
In addition, when I get an assignment to change a graphic we don’t have, I can open up the PDF files the subcontractor sent us with Illustrator and hack away. Also, I can distill MS Word tables and Excel spreadsheets and use them in other applications.
Creating PDFs for print and for web are two different schools of thought. You have to have separate Distiller settings for each. A lot of designers don’t know this, or don’t want to be troubled with it. In my case however, our clients want to see the printed version and will gripe if the resolution is low. Here you go, high resolution. Hope you don’t mind your browser choking to death. Of course, you don’t use browsers. Your employees do, heh heh!
There’s also a plug in app for Acrobat called Pitstop,which tremedously increases editing capability. Granted, it’s not perfect and has it’s own tools rather than simply upgrading the Acrobat tools themselves, but it’s been a lifesaver for me.
PitStop was an absolute lifesaver, especially with imposition, when I was trying to get the first-generation Heidelberg DigiMaster to work right in '01 for the company I was working with. As a replacement for the Docutech it was woefully inadequate without PitStop. I haven’t used either a Docutech nor DigiMaster since '01, so I don’t know how Heidelberg has resolved the imposition problems it had then.
Not true. The creator of the PDF needs to have embedded the fonts in the PDF. Why Acrobat does not do this by default I’m not sure.
I have to deal with PDFs of electronic schematics from Taiwan, and my PDF reader always screams that it’s reinterpreting things becuause it doesn’t have the original Chinese fonts on hand… then plops in the default serif or sanserif system font and totally screws up the drawing. Grr…
We used to make 2 PDFs of each of our documents, one in a single big file with high-resolution images for the printer, and another all in segments for viewing online. Endless bother and trouble, especially on larger manuals. I had to manually insert inter-segment bookamrks so people could get from one chapter to another.
There is a seldom-used calaloguing/indexing utility which makes large PDFs searchable from within the Reader. When we were using it, though, it was very clunky and non-obvious. It’s a separate step fro the PDF creater though, and yields a directory of indexing files that has to be kept with the PDF. I am not certain whether any users ever took advantage of it.
You can add hyperlinks manually by selecting the link area with the Link tool (the one that looks like a little chain). When I output from FrameMaker into PDF, I set it up so that it automatically converts all my FM cross-references into hyperlinks.