[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

[Ivan Trundle]

On 07/12/2010, at 10:01 AM, Tom Worthington wrote:

> Literally the last thing the user wants is a whole report downloaded in PDF.

A bold assumption about the priorities of the end-user. It's not good to generalise. 

There is often merit in using PDFs 'whole' (though the page count does sometimes determine how the document is dealt with and repurposed/used).

> The agency, or Minister, wants a printed document they can show off at a launch event

This example seems singularly focussed on a particular kind of document, distributed in a certain way, for a select audience, and for a single person's vanity.

> Journalists will just read the media release, executive summary, flip through the rest, write their story and the throw the document away.

Good journalists will always dig deeper than this.

> The priority then is to make the PDF version look like the printed "original" (an original which almost no one ever sees).

I'm keen to see any evidence that supports the view that the original is almost never seen...

> What I would like to see is the online version of the document being the "original"

How about an archivable original, stored in any uniform and future-proof way, from which any repurposing is possible?

> What most people will read is the web version of the document

Again, I'd like to see supporting evidence of this.

We don't all live in an online world - otherwise book stores, libraries and publishing houses would have disappeared long ago.

Cheers

iT