PDF is not portable in the digital world
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PDF is not portable in the digital world
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Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#2Do you publish on the Internet?
Do you read a lot of publications on your digital devices?
How about stopping using PDF for internet publications and using EPUB instead (or some other screen independent format)? Please, share your comments.
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#3My first thought on this is that EPUB is not fully portable either ... it's just non-portable in a different set of circumstances. If you want to publish on the internet, for general consumption, just use plain html. That's about as portable as you can get without moving into raw text.
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#4Most devices include a PDF reader, but not an EPUB reader. Yes, you can download one, but as a publisher, you can't expect your readers to jump through that hoop.
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#5PDF is beautiful. Long live PDF.
I read a lot. I don't always want to read from a screen.
Making PDF's available on the internet just saves me from having to search through a journal stack.
PDF's have the advantange of the formatting looks good, and the author/publisher gets to choose how it looks. Usually with input from a professional. This is much better than the "styling" many websites and epubs provide.
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#6I find PDF to be way more portable than most other document formats in terms of saving a document or for printing a document. Saving an HTML page has it's own set of problems, and if I share it I have to make sure to get all the images gathered as well. Word processor documents depend on system fonts, etc., and I cannot be sure that what my document depends on is installed on the other computer. With a PDF, I can be sure to get the necessary elements, be them font, images, etc.
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#7Rendering a Microsoft Word/Powerpoint document as a PDF is a good thing as then one does not need a Doc/Docx/PPT/pptx viewer anymore while most devices come with a PDF viewer builtin (eg. Chrome :)
(and as a bonus it kills the anims if they are there) this while keeping the formatting intact (some minor color changes though depending on one export it).
I tend to keep a whole bunch of things I want to 'read later' in my iBooks collection, just save as PDF and transfer to phone, or if already a PDF just download it directly; zooms great too. I got all kinds of device manuals, but also PADI and other diving reference books; always good to quickly check up on it when in doubt and then to reinforce that information with the knowledge of your dive buddy.
Indeed, for content that does not really need a layout outside of some headers () and paragraphs (
) HTML is perfectly fine.
Quite a few text portions of conference papers (read: Tex :) can be rendered as markdown and then easily converted to HTML, but it won't feel 'as well', thus PDF is a easier format that also reflects the original intent and format.
IETF RFCs typically can be rendered in a myriad of ways thanks to xml2rfc, then again, one mostly will end up reading them from tools.ietf.org or to keep local, render as PDF and load it into iBooks.
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#8Finally, in 2017, when PDF became abundant, does not require additional drivers to use it, has somewhat usable spec, and a lot of 3rd party and open source software to work with do we really need to get rid of it?
Bashing PDF is so 2000...
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#9PDF is beautiful. Long live PDF. I read a lot. I don't always want to read from a screen. Making PDF's available on the internet just saves me from having to search through a journal stack. PDF's have the advantange of the formatting looks good, and the author/publisher gets to choose how it looks. Usually with input from a professional. This is much better than the "styling" many websites and epubs provide.
that's the thing.
1) If you use simple HTML / EPUB majority of publications are good for printing.
2) Think about a relief of storing this documents on an ebook reader
Re: PDF is not portable in the digital world
#10I find PDF to be way more portable than most other document formats in terms of saving a document or for printing a document. Saving an HTML page has it's own set of problems, and if I share it I have to make sure to get all the images gathered as well. Word processor documents depend on system fonts, etc., and I cannot be sure that what my document depends on is installed on the other computer. With a PDF, I can be…
That's where EPUB / MOBI comes for.