A well-reasoned PDF rant
If you’ve spent any reasonable amount of time in the online world of Acrobat–forums, discussion lists, blogs and so on–you’ve undoubtedly run across your share of the always opinionated, often humorous and sometimes factual outbursts of non-believers. That’s certainly not meant to suggest that some of the tirades are not justified, carefully reasoned and/or thoughtfully explained. But a lot of the off-the-cuff posturing and fault finding can be dismissed as little more than techno tantrums, based on either a misunderstanding or a lack of understanding.
So when I stumbled upon a recent blog post that proclaims in its heading to be a “PDF Rant,” I braced for more of the latter. It actually proved to be the former.
In his San Bei Ji blog, moonlighting web designer and developer Joe Lewis sounds off, then offers a series of suggestions to address the problem as he perceives it. He begins with a rant-like statement of the issue:
“PDF is a poorly-understood medium for most developers. In fact, I’ll go as far as to say that 98% (not scientific - you get the picture) of the PDF creators out there have any idea of what is going on underneath the hood when they produce a PDF. I’m talking basic information, like image compression, readability, usability, who is reading this, etc. Typically when doing usability studies for web sites, the process stops abruptly when the PDF is encountered. The user usually backs up a step, and the usability professional shrugs and says ‘let’s move on.’ Never mind the issues with optimizing vector data, embedding fonts, and so on. Typically, people pump out their 6 MB files without a thought. ‘That’s OK - they’ll download it and print it.’ Yeah right - did you test that theory? I thought not.”
Lewis then calmly proceeds to tick off eight detailed “recommendations for the next generation of usable, web-ready PDF design.”
We could use more thoughtful ranting like this that outlines a legitimate issue, then offers solutions. Got a rant of your own? Let us know!
February 24th, 2007 at 10:07 am
Great post, Kurt!
The real scandal, of course, is not PDF, but they way PDF is abused. That, and the compensation paid to so many of these so-called usability experts!
We see this problem all the time with respect to accessible PDF. See my blog post on “Blind Spots” for more of the same. What’s amazing to me is that the CUSTOMERS don’t realize that their sites are chock-full of PDFs… and yet they still hire these usability people who have nothing to say on the subject other than to shrug.