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Ask HN: Why are PDFs still heavily used?

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Re: Ask HN: Why are PDFs still heavily used?

#11

Post by a2800276 »

pwg wrote: post #4

Because most businesses/governments are solidly stuck in the "sheet of paper" paradigm, and PDF provides a way to "make electronic" all those sheets of paper. And once the old paper based process has been "made electronic" by using PDF's, they don't bother with trying to continue past a "sheet of paper" metaphor.

Those sheets of paper have a really long history and humans have evolved it to be just the right size ... to handle and hold. And ergonomically two columns on a sheet of A4 (whatever by 11 in) is a pretty good default for the human visual system.

And ... printers work pretty well with it and while even I have to admit that digital documents are superior for most documents, paper still has a lot going for it: underlining, flipping back and forth, taking notes in the margins. I also find the added spatial dimension sometimes helps me remember (e.g. that was up on the top left of the page next to a chart) ...

Re: Ask HN: Why are PDFs still heavily used?

#17

Post by guskel »

a2800276 wrote: post #11
pwg wrote: post #4

Because most businesses/governments are solidly stuck in the "sheet of paper" paradigm, and PDF provides a way to "make electronic" all those sheets of paper. And once the old paper based process has been "made electronic" by using PDF's, they don't bother with trying to continue past a "sheet of paper" metaphor.

Those sheets of paper have a really long history and humans have evolved it to be just the right size ... to handle and hold. And ergonomically two columns on a sheet of A4 (whatever by 11 in) is a pretty good default for the human visual system. And ... printers work pretty well with it and while even I have to admit that digital documents are superior for most documents, paper still has a lot going for it: underlin…

Paper is useful for the individual but using it in an organization context certainly causes problems.

Re: Ask HN: Why are PDFs still heavily used?

#18

Post by bob1029 »

a2800276 wrote: post #11
pwg wrote: post #4

Because most businesses/governments are solidly stuck in the "sheet of paper" paradigm, and PDF provides a way to "make electronic" all those sheets of paper. And once the old paper based process has been "made electronic" by using PDF's, they don't bother with trying to continue past a "sheet of paper" metaphor.

Those sheets of paper have a really long history and humans have evolved it to be just the right size ... to handle and hold. And ergonomically two columns on a sheet of A4 (whatever by 11 in) is a pretty good default for the human visual system. And ... printers work pretty well with it and while even I have to admit that digital documents are superior for most documents, paper still has a lot going for it: underlin…

The physicality of paper makes it substantially easier for my brain to map and relate content on the page. Each time a digital scroll or zoom is involved, my mental state machine experiences some corruption.

Re: Ask HN: Why are PDFs still heavily used?

#19

Post by comte7092 »

t-3 wrote: post #5

> the content is static Why are you saying this like it's a bad thing? Why would you want dynamic content in a document format? You can't give someone an epub and tell them to read page 197. You can't look at a webpage and know how it will look when you print it out. You also can't just netcat an ebook to your printer and get useful output. What alternatives do we really have? PDF is the most widely supported format…

New and improved link rot: now updated to include document contents.

Re: Ask HN: Why are PDFs still heavily used?

#20

Post by PaulHoule »

a2800276 wrote: post #8
PaulHoule wrote: post #7

Personally I love reading PDF files on my iPad (or cheap Android tablet for that matter.) I can load 100 books and even more technical papers and read them on the bus, spinning at the gym, in bed, curled up on the couch, as a passenger in my car, etc. Posting papers from arXiv to HN I have a choice of pointing to the HTML abstract or the PDF and overall people express preference for the PDF and I believe I get more u…

_all_ PDF features are complicated as hell apart from the "Export to PDF" feature of your word processor :D

My #1 complaint is that for all of the complexity there is no primitive to draw a circle in PDF, instead any ‘circle’ you see in a PDF is an approximation based on Bézier curves. (I thought I was uniquely untalented because I couldn’t draw anime characters with Bézier curves but when I looked at the resource packs for my favorite game I found my favorite illustrator couldn’t do it either.)

I did a deep dive into PDF because I was pitching and sketching out the ultimate test extraction system for corporate use and figured PDF was the most important format to support and I could say boy is it tricky to get the correct text out with the structure properly mapped unless some of those obscure features were in use and it would still be pretty hard then.

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