Oh, and one other thing… if you can’t select text in a PDF, it may be because the creator of the PDF has disabled that capability.
In the Security settings for a new PDF, you can enable or disable printing, selecting and copying text and graphics, changing and saving the document, adding annotations, opening without a password, etc. It’s amazing how many Official Documents (train schedules, forms, etc) I come across on the net that are just wide open…
Just to defend some of those decisions; sometimes they’re made by folks in the communications department who kind of manage the website and have been asked to put up a hundred or so large documents in a relatively short amount of time, and there’s only one person in the department who is competent with web formatting. Let me tell you, in that case I’m printing to postscript and making a pdf. No time and no resources to do a good html version of all those documents, while making a pdf takes all of two steps.
Also, as some have said already, often the documents are meant to be available on the web without necessarially being convenient to use on the web.
I worked for a health insurance company, and we had pdfs of all our contract documents available for customers. Now, that all is important stuff, and was mainly there to be replacements for printed copies that folks get mailed when they become customers. We want them to print it out and keep it. That’s why it’s there, and why it’s in pdf format to begin with (well, at least in part; see previous paragraph).
But, of course, I agree with most of what everyone has said, both as plusses and minuses. Adobe has a great product that is sometimes misused.
Quite true, Eonwe.
Making a document available for download through the web is not the same as intending that it be viewed on* the web… I seem to remember that there are a lot of officilal UK immigration forms that are available for download through the web, but are specifically intended to be printed out, filled in, and then mailed back with appropriate paper documents attached.
I could be worse. I ran across a website a few days ago that was nothing but Flash animations inside frames: no HTML text at all! If I didn’t have high-speed net access I wouldn’t be able to use it!
I am a state legislative and regulatory researcher and many or most of the states offer their bills and regulations in PDF format, such as this bill from New Jersey: http://www.njleg.state.nj.us/2004/Bills/A1500/1405_I1.PDF or the California state register: http://www.oal.ca.gov/notice/39z-2004.pdf
With legal documents like this, it’s really handy to make sure your documents get to the public in the correct format.
However, some backward states like West Virginia: http://www.wvsos.com/adlaw/register/current/092404.pdf#page=10 and New Hampshire: http://gencourt.state.nh.us/rules/september-24-04.pdf are crappy because the way they do their PDFs doesn’t allow you to copy and paste or anything.
I hated .pdf before coming to this job, probably because in previous jobs I didn’t need it or the IT stuff wasn’t set up properly to use it. Here, if I need to send a copy of a signed subcontract or a change order to a contracting officer, I just put it in the copy machine, hit ‘send’ which calls up the address book for the corporation, punch the button and the document is sent to my email. I then forward it to the addressee. pretty damn fine, if you ask me.
Does your copier OCR, or are you sending a PDF that contains nothing but a scanned image? If the scanned image, it could be really annoying for the recipients if they want to copy text out of your document and all they get is a bitmap…
I love this site. Even pit threads are informative. 
I just opened up a .pdf from a vendor, which looks like a spreadsheet, so there are a couple of columns that print on the following page. When I went to change the page layout from portrait to landscape, it let me select landscape, but the document is still portrait. The security settings allow me to make changes, so what’s the deal?
Do you have the full version of Acrobat? If so, try going to File -> Page Setup and a menu pops up. Go to the Paper section and select “Letter.”
If that’s not the problem, go to Document -> Rotate Page and see if that fixes it.
I have the same love/hate relationship with PDFs as many others. I recently had to send a document to a travel agency that included both my signature and an image of my credit card. I could’ve faxed it, but I was on a deadline. So I took formatted the image, saved it as PDF, and password protected it. Then I sent the password in a separate email from the PDF. It’s still not as secure as encryption, of course, but it was the best I could do.
Another use: I write adventures for Dungeons & Dragons. When you do this with the intent to sell, you don’t use the books. Instead you use the System Reference Document (because you can only use what’s in the SRD, and not everything in the books is in the SRD). One small publisher took the time to take the entire SRD and create a searchable, heavily bookmarked PDF and sell it for $10 on RPGNow.com. It’s positively invaluable to me.
PDFs are also good for companies like WorldWorks Games, who makes cardstock images you can fold into buildings and such. They sell the PDF, and you can print out as many copies of the image with your inkjet printer and cardstock.
So I agree that the unnecessary use of them is annoying, but I’ve learned to really like a lot of what PDF offers.
It’s just a scanned image, but that’s what you want for this type of document. Editing after the document has been signed is a bad thing in contracts. Parsing language from a contract will get you laughed out of court, since context is everything.
The PDF format is a poo unworthy of giving to a caged gorilla to toss at obnoxious tourists.
I first learned to loath PDF documents trying to work with them. I managed databases for a reseller; venders and business partners send me product and pricing data to go into our database. Data locked in the propriety .pdf format can’t normally be exported to a readable format. Sure, if you have the full version of Acrobat or Redwing, you might be able to export PDF data to Excel or other delimited files, but it is a clunky and time consuming operation. In all cases, the native document format is preferable to PDF. Absolutely, positively, not one iota of added value comes from the PDF format when two parties are exchanging data. I couldn’t give a wet fart how the data looks on the screen as long as it is properly delimited. Unfortunately, the business world is full of dingleberry brains who’ve been sold of the universality of the PDF.
A few years ago I purchased an iPaq, mainly to read ebooks. It is a versatile little machine. I can read many formats easily: LIT, PRC, PDB, TXT, and HTML. There is one format that just doesn’t work well: PDF. The Acrobat Reader 1.0 for PPC is a cumbersome and despicable beast—it doesn’t truly display the text naturally. At best, it turns the first page of the PDF document into quadrants (reflowing), so the user has to scroll across the page quadrants to view all the text instead of clicking next page. In the worst cases, the reflow fails and the text looks like a second rate ee cummings imitation:
“It’s culpably careless of the man, wh
oever he was,” said Eustace, as he rem
oved the screws, “packing an animal li
ke this in a wooden box with no means
of getting air. Cofound it all! I meant t
o ask Morton to bring me a cage to put i
t in. Now I suppose I shall have to get o
ne myself.”
It is still readable, technically, but damn annoying.
And converting PDF documents isn’t always so easy. Third party tools, like ScanSoft, only work to some degree. If the PDF creator but a password on the document, you can’t convert it with ScanSoft, unless you have an illegal password decoding tool.
Addendum:
In the previous post I claimed “I couldn’t give a wet fart how the data looks on the screen as long as it is properly delimited.” Then when on to rail against the poor screen formatting on the PPC.
Okay, this might look like a contradiction at first glance, but it is not.
In the first case, I want to port data from HERE to THERE, so how it looks on the screen is unimportant. But business partners often put a lot of effort into making their data look pleasing to the eye, so choose PDF, thereby elevating form over functionality. In the second case, I’m reading, so screen format is important. The lock format of the PDF makes it difficult to convert the level of pleasing readability on the PPC platform.
In both cases the PDF format fails to meet the users needs.
How can the tool itself be illegal?
And in both cases it’s because PDFs aren’t the right format for what you want done, not a flaw of the program. Would you hate a Mini Cooper because it fails to haul a 1/2 ton of manure like a pick up?
Well, yes, if someone brought a Mini Cooper to do a Dodge Ram’s job, I’d probably cuss out the MC and the idiot who thought it would be fine. That’s is the a big flaw with PDF, a lot of folk think it is fine in all situations.
Cracking passwords and other DRM is an illegal act in most circumstances. (Activists feel free to disagree.) I’m not a lawyer, but if the only purpose of the tool is to aid in illegal actions, then the legality of the tool could be questioned. But I’ll defray the verdict to someone versed in the law.
Pyrrhonist, the whole idea behind PDFs is that the document will print out correctly and won’t default fonts to Courier, for example. Acrobat has some limited ability to edit the PDFs, but it’s only meant to be used as a stopgap measure in case you find a typo 5 minutes before the meeting. It’s otherwise considered print media.
What’s preventing you from getting your vendors to send you the data files preconverted and in their native formats? If they’re worried about security, have them deliver the data on CD instead of through e-mail. That’s how we have to deliver our data to clients where I work.
The only reason I can think of that you’d have reflow problems with PDFs the distillation process sometimes grabs just one letter or a small group of them, then links the whole line. The word breaks are the areas where the distillation had breaks. Somehow, your application is interpreting these breaks as carriage returns. You’re not working with letters. You’re working with little image files in the shape of letters.
As far as converting to PDF, it’s really not that esoteric. You use a Print command from your application, and choose Acrobat Distiller from your printer list.