[CLUE-Talk] PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

[Timothy C. Klein]

* Jeffery Cann (fabian at jefferycann.com) wrote:
> On Monday 14 July 2003 07:33 pm, Timothy C. Klein wrote:
> > I suspect a lot of folk, many of whom are print-oriented, like the
> > absolute page control that the PDF offers.  Sadly, this is indicative of
> > a simple fact:  these folks do not grok the web.
> 
> I totally disagree (not that I like PDFs particularly).  IMHO, the *reason* 
> PDFs became popular is because unlike the browser war bs, you can count on a 
> PDF looking the same, no matter which OS you're running.
> 
> In the *early days* of the web, CSS was not around, so page display and layout 
> were pretty much up to the whims of the browsers.  Of course, none of them 
> did it the same and saps like me spent hours working out stupid display 
> incompatibilities among popular browsers.
> 
> People who cared about their company's image turned to PDFs for brochures and 
> such because they wanted consistency.  I think they grok'd the web - and it's 
> (then) limitations.

Jeff, When you talk about a company brochure, then I can understand.
Something that existed in print form before, and that has a specific
page layout and image, is acceptable to provide as a PDF.  But not
*only* as a PDF.

However, if one is using the web, and one thinks that the exact
placement of one's company logo on the screen, and the exact font, and
the exact ... are required to protect your company image, then I would
say that one does not grok the web.  Even *with* CSS, such ideas are an
illusion. 

So one gets everything perfectly in place, it looks beautiful,
they're happy.  But one happened to use font X and Y to do so.  Maybe I
run a minimal Linux system.   Maybe even with just Links.  Now the
beautiful website turns to mush.  I don't have the right fonts, so it
can't look good in Mozilla, and often a pure text website is lacking in
these cases too, so Links looks horrible.  I go somewhere else.  A great
example of this was (is?) the Nvidia webpage.  Looks super slick in
Windows under IE, looks like a 4 year old designed it on Linux under Konq
or Moz.

These are the situations where some web designers resort to Flash
(common), or just have one download a PDF of a brochure.  And that is a
failure of the mind, not the technology.  The web is primarily about
information, not image.  Besides, providing the right information *is*
good for a company's image, even if one has to sacrfice a little control
over page layout.

Tim
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== Timothy Klein || teece at silver_NO-UCE_klein.net   ==
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== "Hello, World" 17 Errors, 31 Warnings...         ==
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