[LINK] Government gives thumbs down to PDF format

[Tom Worthington]

Darrell Burkey wrote:
> On Tue, 2010-12-07 at 10:01, Tom Worthington wrote:
> 
>> ...  last thing the user wants is a whole report downloaded in PDF.
> 
> Not this user. I want to see the document in it's proper layout. There's
> more to communicating in the printed medium then just the words Tom. I
> can't stand HTML as the line spacing, kerning, line breaks, fonts etc
> are all over the place. ...

Yes, PDF is very good for the printed medium, but I want electronic
documents, not printed ones. My preference would be to use default line
spacing, kerning, line breaks and fonts in the creation of routine 
government reports, so they will display on a wide range of devices.

There are some newer features in CSS which allow it to get closer to a
high quality typeset result, assuming that you have a browser which can 
render it. But aiming to produce a high quality facsimile of a printed 
document is missing the point.

> Give me pdf any day for a document. I think it's one of the most
> brilliant advancements in online publishing ever! ...

If you want just a printed document, then PDF is fine. But I spend a lot 
of my time trying to extract useful information from PDF. This involves 
removing the inappropriate formatting which is in the PDF and then 
manually putting in the formatting which was lost in the conversion to 
PDF (or was not there in the first place, because it was done by a 
graphic designer, rather someone competent in the creation of electronic 
documents).


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra