back to article How a tax form kludge gifted the world 25 joyous years of PDF

HTML is the world's most common digital document file format. However, it's not the one everyone turns to when they want to create a precise document that looks, prints and behaves the same on any platform on any device. And it's hardly the format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability. For …

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  1. Mage Silver badge
    Facepalm

    Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

    PDF stinks for that. The ONLY plus of PDF is maintaining appearance of paper printout. So it's useful to electronically proof books, manuals, magazines and papers as well as other documents intended to be printed.

    If the goal is immediate reading and portability, then eBook formats win. Or a responsive HTML document (Save As Web Page Complete). Except you need two, Mobi and ePub. Because Amazon are nasty. Calibre is your friend to convert Doc, RTF, HTML, ODT and SOME PDFs to ePub/Mobi/azw. The AZW format, like ePub, supports publisher fonts (mobi doesn't), but the publisher fonts etc only work well on newest Kindles.

    PDFs need a giant screen unless they are designed for smaller than Letter/A4 documents. Also really slow for larger documents.

    Adobe version of ePub readers that are age of Kindles with only basic mobi support work very well with publisher fonts. Some very old eInk and LCD readers.

    PDF is now only of use for people preparing & proofing documents for paper publishing, not ordinary users. It needs to DIE as a document distribution method to the public. HTML or ePub is better for that.

    PDF is primarily for paper, hence fixed layout. Now with people primarily reading on screens, (over 50% of eBooks on phones) and no standard screen size or resolution, like Letter and A4 on paper, layout needs to be "Responsive" and work with user selected rescaling (sharp vs poor eyesight).

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

      PDF is now only of use for people preparing & proofing documents for paper publishing, not ordinary users. It needs to DIE as a document distribution method to the public. HTML or ePub is better for that.

      Good luck prying PDF out of the hands of marketing peeps! Even for on-line use they are addicted to PDF because it preserves exactly the layout they designed. The re-flow and adaptive nature of HTML and ePub are the very antithesis of what these people want, no matter how clunky of inconvenient for users. They also believe that PDF locks in all those sooooo important things like exact corporate colour palettes (without considering that this isn't a real world outcome other than for a few viewers with a professional grade display that's been properly calibrated). And they think that PDF is acceptably secure to lock the document down and thus prevent changes or modification (think of the marketing dweeb's nightmare, of a subtly defaced HTML home page for their company). And PDF does lock in those for most users, most of the time. Few people bother to have a PDF editor, of those that do, fewer still see any point in trying to deface somebody else's dull corporate prose. Curiously, the original purpose of the technology, to make document files flatter and smaller has completely bypassed marketeers, who happily use it to package up huge high res graphics creating 3-20 MB documents from three page pamphlets with 150 words on.

      The marketeers know full well that these days most of their "publications" will be read on screen, but the idea of giving up one iota of control, nope, not a chance.

      1. rg287

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        Good luck prying PDF out of the hands of marketing peeps!

        If only that were true. The number of press releases I see as .doc(x) - because obviously I'm going to have the same fonts installed on my Ubuntu/Mac/Win10 machine as you will on your Win7/Mac box. And my version of Libreoffice will play perfectly well with the formatting that Word lovingly implemented - I think not!

        I assume they do it because they think journos may want to copy snippets out for use in articles - which would be fair except that if you don't fully flatten the file down you can quite happily cut-n-paste text out of a PDF. More to the point, the press release is invariably presented as a page on the corporate website, with a document available for download/offline usage. If I want to cut-n-paste I can do that from the HTML. The entire point of the downloadable version is a static offline-copy for printing. Not an editable .doc or similar!

        Meanwhile I get an explosion of mis-formatted text instead of a nice clean release that I can read through and file away.

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          "The number of press releases I see as .doc(x) - because obviously I'm going to have the same fonts installed on my Ubuntu/Mac/Win10 machine as you will on your Win7/Mac box."

          You could, of course, make some - interesting - amendments to those before passing them on.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          "I assume they do it because they think ..."

          My impression is that they do this because they haven't a clue. I regularly receive .doc and .docx documents that are unreadable because they use some obscure font that is mis-substituted at the receiving end by Word, or unprintable because they include idiocies such as multiple overlapping text boxes. The myth of WYSIWYG is the fundamental problem, and it has permeated to web development as well. When one contacts the originator, the standard response is "it works on my computer", to which I generally reply "maybe, but I'm not looking at your computer, I'm looking at mine", which tends to draw a complete blank.

          Some 35 years ago I worked in print production, which was then a skilled trade. Now anyone can DIY their own documents without the necessary grounding in skills, the outcome is inevitable. The document format is not the primary problem - it's the lack of expertise.

      2. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        "Good luck prying PDF out of the hands of marketing peeps! "

        Who cares about any of their shit?

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          > Who cares about any of their shit?

          THEY do!

          (Nothing against good marketers, but those are the ones you do not even notice are there)

      3. Mark 85

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        Good luck prying PDF out of the hands of marketing peeps!

        Or those of us who use it for engineering type drawings that need a paper trail. I use it for quite a bit as it preserves the original in case of "oops, gotta' go back". Others for "just in case" of legal or any thing else requiring historical records.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          Same here for engineering documents. Even if larger than screen size of my tablets, they scroll just fine. The same for any type of analytical output for what they're now calling data science. The standard used to be TeX, PDF is serving as a useful replacement where there is zero tolerance for rendering a page. Anything besides TeX and PDF don't have enough of a guarantee to bother with, and yes Microsoft, I'm looking at you.

          Aside: I really did like DPS on the NeXT. I'd be using it now if I could find a way to readily rip and replace the rest of the desktop. Menus, docks, etc. are already setup the NeXT way. Nobody even thinks of using my machines. Too weird.

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          > Or those of us who use it for engineering type drawings that need a paper trail.

          We use the files that come out of our software (think .dwg sort of thing), along with all the input data and some PDF renditions for easy graphical preview, all cryptographically signed and archived along with a copy of the exact software that was used to produce them (version and configuration), as is standard in our industry. The estimated lifetime of our documents is five to twenty years and it is expected that we are able to replicate the exact output at any time during that period (there will be at least one other independent entity with the same requirement on their identical copy of the data).

          PDF alone would just show you a visual representation of the result but not how you did get there, for that you also need the input data and the operations applied to it.

          Of course, your requirements may vary.

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

            I agree pdf's are useful, but in my industry unchangeable distribution of drawings and information is paramount. PDF information is very easily edited and then forwarded as "original" ...

            Certificates etc can be easily forged and then your client has a big pile of steaming inexactitude waiting for their perusal.

            At my expense.

    2. Peter Prof Fox

      Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

      ePub etc. is for fisher-price publishing.

      Placement and styling is important.

      Anybody who cares about communication should appreciate how design affects interpretation.

      Lack of control over basic 'css-level' styling is a complete fail.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        "Placement and styling is important."

        ePub is OK for novels or the like - when you have mostly text whose format is usually not very important.

        Try any ebook where you have images, charts, graphs and any other kind of non-textual data which are reflown randomly somewhere in some page.

        That's the same issues HTML has, but at least HTML - from its very own name - was never designed as a document formatting language, just as a way to quickly write, distribute and link information, regardless of the device. All the attempts made later to develop HTML into a document laanguage (moreover combined with application development capabilities) led to a Frankenstein which still fails to deliver proper documents - try to print it any HTML page and usually you get a mess.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: "Placement and styling is important."

          >try to print it any HTML page and usually you get a mess.

          Even tools like Print Edit WE for Chrome have difficulty rendering HTML pages into something fit for printing to PDF/Printer.

          Why do want a PDF/print out? because it enables me to read the article off line and retain a copy so that I can go back and confirm details if necessary. There is nothing more frustrating referring to a webpage, getting a client querying your point, you going back and discovering that either the webpage has changed or disappeared totally. News sites such as the BBC are very good at 'amending' articles...

          1. rg287

            Re: "Placement and styling is important."

            News sites such as the BBC and El Reg are very good at 'amending' articles...

            FTFY.

            1. Killfalcon Silver badge

              Re: "Placement and styling is important."

              As a massive nerd, I've picked up the current round of Warhammer 40k rulebooks as ebooks.

              Some only display properly in ONE epub reader (of dozens) - the Redium addin for Chrome. There's no _standard_ behind epubs, it's just a mess of different implementations that disagree on if you an have an image behind text or not, and if you can, they disagree on how you declare that, so publishers just have to pick one and hope it works well enough.

              PDF is slow and annoying to use, and often it's used by people who thing two-column portrait A4 is a close match to a desktop monitor, but it does at least reliably produce the same output on different platforms.

          2. ma1010
            Big Brother

            Re: "Placement and styling is important."

            What do you mean "'amending' articles"? Are you accusing the Ministry of Truth of using IT to "rectify" previous news stories? Crimethink! Expect a visit from the Ministry of Love.

            Oceania is at war with Eastasia. Oceania has always been at war with Eastasia!

        2. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "Placement and styling is important."

          > led to a Frankenstein which still fails to deliver proper documents

          HTML delivers very proper documents, much richer in content and "presentability"¹ than pretty much anything else I can think of, all in a format that is still entirely possible (and for professionally authored documents, this is often effortless) to read in a text editor if need be. It is rich, accessible, portable and reasonably easy to both produce and consume, all without proprietary tools. How on Earth does that "fail to deliver proper documents"???

          > - try to print it any HTML page and usually you get a mess.

          Printing? Bloody printing? What is this? 1980-fucking-5? At the office we *had* a printer. Earlier this year our accountant insinuated that we could print some form or another so I chucked it in the bin². No more silly requests since then.

          ¹ Not presentation as that is not HTML's job. What is important is that it captures content and makes it possible to render it across many different visual and audio platforms. Reliably capturing meaning is the next step but I am not aware of anything that can reliably do so at the present time.

          ² The printer, not the accountant, if nothing else because the bin was already half full.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: "Placement and styling is important."

            "Printing? Bloody printing? What is this? 1980-fucking-5?"

            Just wait until your business gets challenged on something and you need a paper trail to prove your side of it. BTW you'll find that swearing at the judge doesn't improve your case.

            1. Anonymous Coward
              Anonymous Coward

              Re: "Placement and styling is important."

              > Just wait until your business gets challenged on something

              Like GPG signing the tax documents? Tax office winghed about that. We pointed them to the relevant section of the digital signatures act, they went "ah" and never bothered us again.

              Yes we could have used X.509 like almost everyone else but there is a reason why we do not, which is not relevant here.

              > and you need a paper trail to prove your side of it.

              You utterly fail to understand traceability, we do not. Ours is a safety of life industry where you do not fart without that being verified, approved and recorded.

              > BTW you'll find that swearing at the judge doesn't improve your case.

              And you will find that this is not a fucking court of law.

              1. Anonymous Coward
                Anonymous Coward

                Re: "Placement and styling is important."

                It's amusing to see your smug and profane ranting based on your limited perspective! Just because you can't imagine a good use for something doesn't mean others can't.

                Saying "you're still using XX? This is (fill in year)" is a pathetic argument. I've seen many technologies stay useful in spite of shortsighted twats like you insisting they're dead.

      2. Schultz
        Stop

        "Placement and styling is important" ...

        if the content requires it. Sometimes you just want the text, which explains the great success of the good old printed book. Sometimes you want sound, or moving pictures, or VR. Just find the right medium for your job and accept that others may prefer a different medium / file format.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: "Placement and styling is important" ...

          > Sometimes you just want the text, which explains the great success of the good old printed book.

          The good old printed book is much more than "just the text"!!!

          Hours could be spent on deciding the right kerning, and vigorous arguments could be had on whether two (or more) letters formed a ligature or not. There is nothing like a well-typeset book.¹

          What bothers me is those people who insist on knocking out PDFs for no sensible reason at all and then end up using a single space form, hyphens instead of en, em and figure dashes or the minus sign (let alone soft- and non-breaking hyphens), three dots instead of ellipses, and so on.

          ¹ And nothing worse than a poorly typeset one. Especially if you read languages that are typographically richer than English.

          1. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

            Re: "Placement and styling is important" ...

            The good old printed book is much more than "just the text"!!!

            Yes, but that excess is often irrelevant to readers. Anyone with even cursory knowledge of textual scholarship knows that audiences generally consider all editions of prose books to be essentially the same, even though they may be typeset completely differently.

            There are certainly cases where typesetting matters to more than a small subset of the audience, but those cases are the minority. And most of the professional book designers and typesetters I've heard discuss the subject are well aware of that.

            Precision layout is mostly important to the people who lay things out. For most other audiences its effects tend to be detectable but not hugely significant.

      3. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        Placement and styling is important.

        Anybody who cares about communication should appreciate how design affects interpretation.

        I have a Master's in digital rhetoric, so I'm well aware that design affects interpretation. I've read scores of scholarly articles on the subject, presented on it at academic conferences, done user research, etc.

        It's naive to claim that the rhetorical effects and additional information channels afforded by precise control over layout are an absolute good, or that they outweigh the tremendous advantages of responsive layouts, particularly when addressing a large and diverse audience using a wide array of devices. Unreadable documents have proven very poor at communicating and persuading.

        Frankly, based on your comment, I rather doubt you've studied this area in any depth.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          >I have a Master's in digital rhetoric

          Ah! someone who most probably has read ALL of Tufte's books.

    3. Wellyboot Silver badge

      Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

      >giant screens< - 25 years ago 1024x768 on a 14" VDU was normal, more than a couple of pages of PDF filled the spare RAM space on an average computer, (queue renditions of "when I was t' lad...") and if you had said people would volunteer to use 5" screens, people would have died laughing.

      ePub&HTML may well be better for the current phones but after 25 years PDF is now the defacto minimum standard for documents in a graphic format, it'll still be here in another 25 years just like .TXT

      1. Wellyboot Silver badge

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        I get thumbs down here?

        For the historical reminiscence or the predictable human inertia?

        1. PhilipN Silver badge

          I get thumbs down here?

          No Yorkshireman'd say "t'lad" when referring to himself.

          Sheesh - Southerners!

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: I get thumbs down here?

            No Yorkshireman'd say "t'lad" when referring to himself.

            Depends. I could, for instance, say it when quoting a member of the older generation commenting about me.

    4. Headley_Grange Silver badge

      Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

      @Mage: "PDF is now only of use for people preparing & proofing documents for paper publishing"

      All my clients use paper, and lots of it, for contracts, specs, NDAs, minutes, invoices, as-builts, verification matrices, certificates, training packs, manuals, expositions, etc., and I can't see any of that changing in the next ten years. Even the ones who have integrated paperless systems (e.g. DOORS) end up converting to Word then pdf for reviewing and issuing docs. The Italians like to sign and date every page of a paper copy of everything. The Germans still use Fax, FFS, and won't take an email copy of anything vaguely contractual. Most European organizations have invested in a fancy company stamp and want some nice white paper to use it on. The Swiss won't even take a pdf scan of an invoice and want an original snail-mailed to them with a wet signature and then they'll bounce it because they want the original expense receipts as well.

      PDF works OK for me and the most of the people who pay me. It's secure enough - but it doesn't have to be Fort Knox because there's a paper copy in a filing cabinet to resolve disputes.

      1. Spanners Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        I regularly come across people who "must" have fax. I come across them once anyway, then I don't do business with them. This is probably harder when you are owned or controlled by someone with their mind still in the 90's.

        I do see people trying to use PDFs for backup purposes. Someone once asked me if a printout of his emails would be suitable for an enquiry. I advised that it would be good proof that he had access to a printer but not of much else. He then asked if it would be any better if he saved them as .PDFs. I pointed out that this would not even prove that he had a printer but it would be more tree friendly!

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          > Someone once asked me if a printout of his emails would be suitable for an enquiry. I advised that it would be good proof that he had access to a printer but not of much else.

          At last someone with some familiarity with basic forensic principles!

      2. Paul Hovnanian Silver badge

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        "All my clients use paper,"

        I've seen the same thing. I deal with one outfit that requires my signature on some forms. The office e-mails me the PDF, I print it, sign it and scan the signed copy. A PDF of the signed copy goes back. Now for the fun part. That form has to go from the local office to corporate via fax. And sometimes the local office demands the wet-signed* copy. So I have to follow the e-mail up with snail-mail and wait to see what the delay will be. There is no way to predict what the people on the receiving end will demand.

        *A few times, I've been requested to sign with blue ink. So as to verify that they have the same piece of paper that I scribbled on, I suppose.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          > A few times, I've been requested to sign with blue ink.

          Ah yes! The blue ink. :-) I got that once a few years ago. Since then I only carry black pens with me, mostly out of spite.

          I explain (truthfully) that if asked to recognise my own signature on a document I will look not at the signature, which could be anything, but at the presence of certain marks elsewhere on the paper. Since the above I also do not sign in blue so if it's a blue signature it's not mine.

          For business correspondence, it is all signed electronically whether clients, providers, the tax office and the regulator like it or not. Again, you want proof or you want ceremony?

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

            "Again, you want proof or you want ceremony?"

            Ceremony, complete with witnesses, used to be the whole point of signing.

      3. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        > Most European organizations have invested in a fancy company stamp

        Ah yes, the Company Stamp, or how to prove that you took the PDF, printed, Stamped it, scanned it and saved it back as PDF, wasting many trees and cumulative man hours by the end of the year.

        Worst part is that this often comes from people who are simply not old enough to have seen a computerless office.

    5. Barry Rueger

      Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

      Where to start...

      The reason why PDF is ubiquitous is simple: you can be 99% certain that it will display properly and legibly on any and all computing devices, from monster water-cooled super fast gaming rigs to the lowliest of cheap ass Android phones.

      It has been many years since I have heard someone say "Your PDF file won't open on my computer."

      Aside from TXT there is no other document type that can make that claim, including some sub-sets of MS Office documents.

      (Once had some goof "Web manager" send an MS Project file to a group of 100+ piano teachers. Oh the hilarity that followed!)

      1. Ken Hagan Gold badge

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        "The reason why PDF is ubiquitous is simple: you can be 99% certain that it will display properly and legibly on any and all computing devices, from monster water-cooled super fast gaming rigs to the lowliest of cheap ass Android phones."

        Really? *Legibly*? On a device with a 3-inch screen?

        What ... the ... fuck ... are ... you ... smoking?

        1. Celeste Reinard

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          What I am smoking is whatever there is on the carpet... when it comes to reading I started with a Palm TX, until some miscreant in Leuven stole it from me on an epic pub crawl (Hi there, I hope Satan will eat your soul with a spoon), necessitating me to anything ese but .pdb, and passed the different formats, such as ePub, which I suspect being created by Satan, DjVu (idem, but then His adjunct), and finally conversed to pdf, giving me the ability to create not only booklike renditions, but also enabled me to make the text easier to the eye, one of the best arguments (and one I haven't seen above) to use pdf. Since reading almost everthing from a screen, that is one issue: how to continue on difficult texts (or simple, dependend on your education) for hours on end. ... And these days one can carry it even into bed, since the tubular bach-breaking papaerweight is a thing of a by tiimes hilarious past, and ENJOY a bit of good printing, instead of having to deal with eye-scourching ugliness from things like ePub (eating your soul away). Aesthetics go a long way, and when it comes to reading, it can become essential for those of finer taste; it makes reading good reading.

      2. brotherelf

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        ""It has been many years since I have heard someone say "Your PDF file won't open on my computer."""

        Funny that, I've had two this year already. One was a form, intended for printout, that was built in Lice fickle Designer and used JavaScript to replace the text "if the form does not appear, use a proper software to view this" with an entirely non-interactive form; and the other is that one of the default Linux viewers still can't do transparency.

        1. J. Cook Silver badge
          Pirate

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          ... And that's why I want to locate the person who thought that putting a general purpose scripting engine into the PDF viewer was a good idea and run them through the Guido school of Admin training. (you know, the one that is held in the back alley of a nice brick building with a strong lad named Guido, and you know, run them face-first into the wall a few dozen time until they've learned their lesson...)

          We've blocked more than a few attempts at desktop ownage from *that* particular vector...

      3. Terry 6 Silver badge

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        There's a "yes but.." aspect. I, as a consumer, do get to see far too many PDF instruction manuals that display really poorly on my PC's screen, or even worse, print in a font too small to read.. And that jump from the bottom of one page to the start of the next as I scroll. Not the PDF standard's fault, just the idiots who created the document.

        1. Roland6 Silver badge

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          >And that jump from the bottom of one page to the start of the next as I scroll. Not the PDF standard's fault, just the idiots who created the documentreader.

          I don't get that jump with Foxit Reader when it's displaying in 'continuous' mode.

          >or even worse, print in a font too small to read..

          The worst part about this one, is that often it isn't possible to adjust printer settings to enlarge text. Sometimes having an A3 printer is helpful, but wasteful as it does permit the enlargement of an A4 source into an A3 hardcopy.

          1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

            Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

            "I don't get that jump with Foxit Reader when it's displaying in 'continuous' mode."

            Nor Okular with scrolling although pg up and pg down keys respond with a jump.

            1. Roland6 Silver badge

              Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

              >Nor Okular with scrolling although pg up and pg down keys respond with a jump.

              Understood, with Foxit pg up and pg down are screen pg up and screen pg down, not PDF page up/down.

              If I put Foxit into page mode then Pg up/down are PDF pg up/down.

      4. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        > The reason why PDF is ubiquitous is simple: you can be 99% certain that it will display properly and legibly on any and all computing devices

        Yes and thereby you are missing the point. Your PDF may display perfectly well on a myriad devices. But is that what you wanted?

        Or did you want to convey information to other people reliably, efficiently and in an æstethically pleasing manner? Because those two are not the same goal at all.

        For a start not everyone is sighted, and those who are have wildly differing capabilities and perceptions both in terms of physiological performance (visual acuity, colour blindness, etc.), and environmental and situational conditions.

        There is no doubt that there is a need for picture-perfect layout and presentation in some cases, and PDF is very convenient for that, while still allowing graceful degradation if the file has been packaged properly. But all too often that is not what is required. Think about HTML vs plain-text email if you will or alternatively, thirty years ago we were using typewriters and managing to do the same stuff as we still do, with a single monospace font, underline, bold and two different colours if you were lucky.

        At my company, we moved our quality manuals from PDF to Markdown in 2016. The result has been that now people not actually *read* them more often but they are also kept up to date with updates and improvements on most weeks as opposed to once or twice a year.

        Why? For a start, they are handy references for many processes that need to be carefully executed so it makes sense to check them out. Then, frequently people access them via their mobile phones, where PDFs are not all that convenient but a nice responsive and accessible HTML rendering is. Lastly, because it's just a Markdown that you can edit with pretty much anything from ed upwards, people actually *do* keep them up to date.

        As a bonus, maintaining the quality stuff in a Git repo is rather convenient and about as traceable as you can get.

        So you see? Without taking any merit away from PDF which is very useful when needed, I wish it would stop being abused by barely computer literate people who could use their time in better ways than coercing whatever it is they wanted to write out of their word processors, while remaining convinced that it is very important that we should get their horribly formatted and barely legible prose in all its Comic Sans glory.

        Let's see how many of you PDF botherers are out there. >:)

        1. Doctor Syntax Silver badge

          Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

          "At my company, we moved our quality manuals from PDF to Markdown in 2016."

          AIUI Markdown is text only. So your quality manuals don't need illustrations of any kind?

          1. Anonymous Coward
            Anonymous Coward

            Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

            > So your quality manuals don't need illustrations of any kind?

            Ever heard of ASCII art?

      5. Michael Wojcik Silver badge

        Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability

        you can be 99% certain that it will display properly and legibly on any and all computing devices

        I don't know what magical unicorn devices you use, but the vast majority of PDFs I have aren't legible on my (Android) smartphone or my Kindle. A small rectangular subset of a given page may be legible at any given moment, but scrolling half a dozen times just to read a few lines is not a usable reading experience.

        PDF is a non-responsive format, and as such is inherently limited on what device form factors a given document can be usably rendered.

        (I won't even bother noting that the vast majority of "any and all computing devices" don't even have a display, and chalk that phrase up to lazy thinking.)

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