Nielsen and McDaniels have both confused the situation by overstating their cases. A lot of Nielsen's comments hit at poor use of PDF rather than deficiences of the tool (lack of navigation aids, long sequential text passages). McDaniels is right to answer these points, and to point out that PDF is often best for "official" documents where the user must not be able to tamper with the content or layout.

But as a viewer (unwilling) rather than composer of PDF docs I don't like seeing them on my screen, and McDaniels either avoids the more serious of Nielsen's points or exaggerates the importance of partial remedies:

• You have to wait for the plug-in to load and then you see nothing until ALL of the first page has loaded.
  
• In all PDFs I've seen the layout is fixed (like fixed-width HTML tables) and does not re-flow. So zooming in or opening the navigation pane (if provided) causes horizontal scrollbars in the text.
  
• PDFs are designed for printing, and their page-breaks often disrupt the flow of the content.
  
• The fonts I've seen in PDFs are optimised for printing and look fuzzy on screen.
  

So I think:

• PDF may be the best or even the only choice for "official" documents where a prescribed layout and / or tamper-proofing are required.
  
• For any other purpose HTML is likely to be better - and you can still print HTML pages if you want.
  

Posted by: Philip Chalmers on July 23, 2003 08:58 AM

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Pity more hasn't been done with .CHM help format.

Posted by: on July 23, 2003 02:14 PM

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McDaniels has zero credability on this issue. Ask a Microsoft employee about Word usability and he could come up with 1,00+ reasons why Word is esy to use. Just like using PDFs for online use, the people that do it everday know it sucks.

Personally and proffesionally I agree with Nielson, PDF sucks for print. Acrobat and the plug-in crash all the time! Only an Adobe employee would argue.

lso, its noteworthy that most of the pro-PDF points made by McDaniels were all from the developer's POV; not the user's.

Posted by: Ryan on July 23, 2003 07:32 PM

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Acrobat Reader is stable? I know that fat PDF files often freeze my browser. And Acrobat Reader 6 is a bloated joke.

PDF files serve some limited purposes, such as delivering forms in the format required by the government, simple brochures that you WANT people to print out, ebooks, protecting content that you don't want copied.

But too many people don't know flip about preparing a PDF file for use on the web--graphic designers who make PDF files from Quark files are the worst offenders, followed by marcom types in love with non-standard fonts (and plenty of them) and know nothing about optimizing images.

So, PDF files are neither all bad nor all good. I would rather see a defense of the PDF format on the web by someone other than an Adobe employee. It's kinda like Ford rising to the defense of the SUVs that saved their corporate behind.

Posted by: Lee on July 24, 2003 12:57 AM

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