[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

[Birch, Jim]

Ivan Trundle wrote:

>There are difficulties in knowing end-user expectations in the electronic world. At least with print, expectations are generally uniform.

Not even with print really.  A PDF should be optimized for what is called the "mechanical specifications" of the target printing device - this include horizontal and vertical resolutions and the colour process - to avoid problems like moiré lines and undesired colour effects.  A commercial printer will typically have a much greater resolution than home and office printers.  In the advertising industry, we set ads which might appear in multiple publications.  We used some smart software that built the PDFs each publication time from the source files and design based on the specs of the target publication.  In the case of brochures, packaging, etc, the PDF was tailored the specific printshop/printer.  (Clients would refuse to pay for dodgy ads or printed products.)

The stuff that you download on the web is rarely commercial print quality - it would be too big - so you get a PDF that is probably just good enough for your average office printer or even a screen quality version which may not actually print well.   This impacts graphic elements but isn't usually so important for standard text documents where the printer's internal fonts are used.  Sometime you can print a document that looks mostly good but a heading in a special font or some of the graphics look they were scanned from a 1980's dot matrix page.

- Jim 




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