I’m a straightforward sort. If I have information I want to impart I would put it up in black and white on a web page. If I wanted to make it all snazzy with photo’s and tables and shit, I’d use the appropriate HTML. If I wanted to jazz it up even more I might even throw in a javascript or two.
What I would not do. Is compile it in a PDF file which is only accessible to people who’ve got Adobe Acrobat, takes forever to open and has a tendency to lock up all your browser windows. I wouldn’t make people who want my info but aren’t cursed with Adobe software go to Adobe’s site and spend an hour downloading and installing the software. I wouldn’t fix it such that simple highlighting, copying and pasting of the text is nigh on impossible.
I’m just not that much of a sadist.
So, can anyone tell me if Adobe Acrobat software and PDF’s 'n shit actually has any advantages over webpage format? Because I’m tired of feeling like the butt of some vast techno-geek practical joke everytime I want to access a fucking file.
Thanks for your assistance in this matter. Any and all help will be appreciated and kept on record for such time as when I herd all the dickheads who had anything to do with the inception, development, promotion (even by word of mouth) and promulgation of Adobe Acrobat into a huge pig pen and firebomb them of the face of the earth.
One advantage: information in a PDF file cannot be easily edited. HTML web pages can be downloaded, copied, altered, and re-posted without the original author’s consent; PDF makes this much harder. So if you’re interested in preserving your intellectual property, PDF makes sense.
I’m not saying that even 10% of the PDF files on the web were posted as PDF files for that reason. But you asked for any advantages.
PDFs are guaranteed to print just like they appear on the screen (because they use PostScript as the layout). Webpages aren’t.
PDFs usually do not allow the viewer to select and copy text, which some consider great for ebooks and other copyright material (though on Linux you can just do pdf2ps and then ps2ascii to get the text).
A webpage with graphics is a set of many files. With PDF, everything goes into one simple file.
PDF have 8 layers of compression. Webpages don’t (though you can zip them, but that’s a pain for the end-user).
Personally, I prefer pure PostScript, since it is easy to modify if one knows the PostScript language, while PDFs are compiled and thus essentially immutable once their made. But for the average Windows l00z3r, PDFs are an easy format to handle, and that’s why they’ve taken off.
Incidentally, if you don’t like Acrobat you can switch to any of a gazillion other PDF viewers.
What? You want all your web-served documents to be HTML? Jeez, I suppose you don’t have the latest version of Flash, or Real Media, or the DivX codec, or…
Jeez, but I think you are overstating the potential hardships of using Acrobat just the tiniest bit.
Here are a couple of advantages: 1) It’s faster to compile an already-existing document as a PDF than it is to rewrite the document as an HTML page; 2) It’s easier to ensure consistent printing results by compiling documents with complex formatting in PDF.
I personally have no problem with someone providing info on the Web in PDF, if PDF is used for its intended purpose, which is document portability.
I have converted hundreds, thousands, of Word and Excel docs to PDF before placing them on a web.
I understand your frustrations, but it’s usually done just for expedience. When a corporation or government agency is required to publish certain documents, PDF is the only cost-effective way to do it. Also there is a strong desire/need to have the web version be identical to the previously printed version, and PDF certainly is the best way to achieve that.
As a web designer I’d love to write good HTML instead of just converting stuff to PDF. But I don’t have time. There’s just too many documents. PDF is often the only cheap, fast and easy way to make huge amounts of information available.
(Nobody thinks it’s particularly secure, though. Anyone can buy the full version of Acrobat and start merrily editing away.)
An acrobat file is self-contained: All the images, fonts, etc. are part of the PDF, so it’s a single unit that can be emailed or saved on a hard disk or whatever. A web page isn’t necessarily, so a PDF is a better choice (assuming the software works correctly) for maximal portability. You’re also not fucking around with different browsers and such.
Actually, the newest version of Acrobat uses 128-bit security, which is fairly decent security, IMHO. Of course, you do have to lock the document, or people can edit / reverse engineer the pdf file.
It’s like saying that deadbolts aren’t secure because people forget to lock their doors.
The newest version of Acrobat allows you to edit text on the fly within the document. Don’t like that 40%? Change it to a 4.0%. The new version also allows you to save a PDF as a RTF file.
Earlier versions of Acrobat didn’t allow you to do this, which gave the illusion of security. There have always been third-party tools (Gemini was the one I worked with) that let you export PDF files, though, with varying degrees of success.
And neither third-party tools nor Acrobat itself allows you to modify encrypted PDF, as far as I know.
You can do as “save as” and save the PDF as another PDF - you can’t save to other formats if security is set up correctly.
The PDF you just created still has the same security parameters as the one you saved as. In other words, if I create foo.pdf with “no print/no edit/no save” security, and you open it and save it as bar.pdf, bar.pdf will also have the “no print/no edit/no save” security.
This reminds me of an incident - my co-worker went through one PDF he wanted secure. He marked everything as “secure as possible.” However, he forgot the “disable others from changing security” setting (you have to type a password to enable this, it’s not a simple checkbox). So, I just opened the document, changed the security back to none and gave it back to him. He was impressed that I managed to hack Adobe Acrobat…
Again, there may be third party programs specifically designed to reverse engineer secure PDF documents. However, it’s not a trivial process.
You mean those piece of shit files have advantages? Man do I hate PDF’s. I hate trying to read one of them with that little fucking hand that you have to click and hold to scroll down n’ shit. Why pay $500 for 1 piece of crappy ass software when you can pay $500 and get a whole suite of crappy software (MS Office) which can do just as much as a PDF? I know recently some company came out with a PDF editor and converter for like $100 bucks, but still, PDF’s SUCK ASS.
Note to ParentalAdvisory - I have neither a copy of Office, nor the requisite OS to install it onto. As multi-platform, global user type formats go, it’s not that bad.
AFAIK only Acrobat and a few other PDF viewers implement encryption. If you use Ghostscript or other *nix viewers, you can circumvent the encryption because they don’t support PDF limitations. It was a real stupid idea of Adobe to put the responsibility for encryption in the viewer instead of in the format.
The Australian Tax Office provides all their required forms as downloadable PDFs. This ensures that any form you print and fill in is in precisely the format they require for processing and filing - no more, no less.
This, in my opinion, is precisely the way PDFs should be used.
Yeah, sometimes a PDF is used where something else would make more sense.
But it can be necessary. What would you do with maths/science stuff? AFAIK it’s impossible to do complicated equations decently in HTML (or even word, really), so you need PDF, PS or something.
Ben, I don’t understand why you’re having so many problems with Acrobat. Web browsers nowadays have a PDF reader as a feature. It’s just like loading any web page.
If a PDF takes forever to load, it’s the same fault as a web page that takes forever to load. It’s the design of the page, not the software that developed it.
Adobe software is a hell of a lot more stable than anything Microsoft puts out. Plus, the Reader version of Acrobat is free. The browsers which include Reader as a feature are free. Where’s all this time and expense you’re talking about?
The only thing I can think that might be causing you compatibility problems is the Distiller options. You can have different settings for web than press. Admittedly, our R&D staff had to go back and forth with our printing company to match the settings for generating press-ready PDFs, but I’ve never had problems using the same settings for web-based PDFs to send out to clients who still use 486s.
Version 4 of Acrobat onward can edit the text of PDFs. Also, you can still copy and paste text from a PDF into a Word document, but you’ll lose formatting. Adobe Illustrator can create AND EDIT PDFs! It’s been a lifesaver for me, when PDFs are all the client has for us to work with.
Ben, can you tell us what specific problem you’re having with PDFs? I wasn’t too thrilled with them to begin with myself, but now I see how handy they are.