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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?

#21

Post by jasong »

In my experience PDFs are mostly used to ensure what you're seeing is what everyone else is seeing. If I sent out a Word or Powerpoint doc, I could be 90% sure someone would have a formatting issue. Maybe their default margins are different or they don't have the same fonts installed. It's a better format for the reader when they don't require edit access.

Google Docs + MS Office has probably figured this out by now, but there's also ton of historical momentum keeping it in use.

As a financial auditor I remember being baffled how people would go out of their way to create paper processes. A spreadsheet that requires confirmation would be printed, signed, stapled to another piece of paper - all so I can remove the staples and scan it to track digitally in our audit software. At least I knew sending them a PDF would come back looking the same...

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

#22

Post by abdullahkhalids »

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…

PDF should be replaced... By a document format that displays statically rendered content in page size chunks, but with some of the backend problems removed.

Stuff like, embedding text in a way that improves accessibility and copying text works nicely. Being able to right click copy images would be also nice.

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

#23

Post by rchaud »

PDFs are the only choice for portable read-only information. You click a button in Word and it exports with 100% fidelity exactly what you had on screen. Open it on a phone, or tablet, it retains its original size.

Web standards may have caught up, but nobody is sending anybody .mhtml files. I'm pretty sure most email providers would flag emails with such attachments as malicious.

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

#24

Post by thow_away_34564 »

I think the answer is in that PDFs are used to convey 90%+ static content offline in a way where you could open up 10-year-old PDF and it will still look exactly like it did the day it was created. Because of this is it the system of record for reports in business, government, academia, and other organizations.

The other use case are fillable forms that are legally binding. In larger business or the government where you have your identity tied to a private key, you can sign a PDF with it.

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

#25

Post by stonogo »

Almost all of the complaints in the linked document boil down to "PDFs are not websites," which is ironic, considering that is the main benefit to PDFs.

A bunch of them are just dumb assumptions, like vague complaints about accessibility, ignoring the fact that PDFs have supported screen readers, alt text, etc for longer than the web has.

I laughed out loud at the assertion that PDFs are "stuffed with fluff" and the web is a model of focused, concise writing.

"Jarring user experience" and "Cause disorientation" are the same complaint rewritten to highlight different aspects of one problem.

Web sites and PDFs are different tools serving different needs. The complaint that PDF content is "static" is, confoundingly, both untrue and entirely the point. PDFs have support Javascript, media embeds, advanced navigation tools (hyperlinks, cross-refs), and more, for years and years... but most people don't encounter much beyond formfills and hyperlinks, because the rest of that stuff is not what people want out of a document format.

In other words, all the consultants can write all the words about how PDF should be the web, but the market has spoken, and PDFs are the way they are because they meet real needs. Figuring out what those are might be a better use of time than shouting into the wind.

Now that I think about it, why should I have to throw away thirty years of PDF-compatible software because nobody bothered to make a decent PDF reader for your phone?

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

#26

Post by runjake »

- The content is normally static.

- They render consistently on any mainstream platform, without access to external resources.

- They load, scroll, and zoom relatively quickly on mainstream platforms.

I don't think PDFs are terrible to view on mobile. I think it works out pretty well. I prefer viewing them than the mess that is an HTML page with CSS. Usually whoever authored it ddin't do a good job of making it pinch/zoomable and accessible.

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

#28

Post by Arainach »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #22
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…

PDF should be replaced... By a document format that displays statically rendered content in page size chunks, but with some of the backend problems removed. Stuff like, embedding text in a way that improves accessibility and copying text works nicely. Being able to right click copy images would be also nice.

Improving accessibility may be fair (I'm not familiar with the details), but in many cases PDFs are used for scenarios where the authors don't want the individual assets to be trivially extractable. Even if an advanced user can do so programmatically, a static layout is often a feature, not a bug. If the authors wanted the reader to be able to quickly pull out assets and recreate it they would distribute the content in some other format.

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

#29

Post by 908B64B197 »

abdullahkhalids wrote: post #22
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…

PDF should be replaced... By a document format that displays statically rendered content in page size chunks, but with some of the backend problems removed. Stuff like, embedding text in a way that improves accessibility and copying text works nicely. Being able to right click copy images would be also nice.

Read-Only Docx solves pretty much all these issues.

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

#30

Post by morsecodist »

I have a love hate relationship with PDFs, the hate mostly comes from parsing them. However, I think they are often the best thing for the job. A PDF is totally portable, your images and fonts are included in the file (I know you can do that with HTML but it is not how it is typically done), everyone can open them on every device, and you know when they do they will see exactly what you do, even if it may have a bit of an awkward aspect ratio. You also know it will look good printed out which is a huge pain to achieve using web standards. Most programs used by normal people (word/google docs, powerpoint/slides) have an intuitive export to PDF flow while a web page export, is usually more complicated and dissimilar to the document they originally created. There are whole categories of questions you need to answer about your formatting using web standards that are just not even a consideration in PDFs and most people don't want to need to think about that just to share a document.
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