RE: Nielsen frags PDF with misinformative Alertbox... AGAIN!

[Chris Gooch <chris -dot- gooch -at- lightworkdesign -dot- com>]

Here's my post for the week:  :-)

Many people (Nielson included it seems) slag off PDF
on the basis that some PDFs are badly designed.
But it's pretty easy to design PDFs so they;

1) are a suitable size for viewing on screen
	(not as small as Acrobat's help, not as
	big as A4 or USLetter, but something
	else, B5 or so say) which will still look
	ok if printed

2) disable the confusing aspects of Adobe's user
	interface (all those icons and buttons and
	scroll bars)

3) add your own user interface elements directly
	to the doc (I put them down one side).
	Forward / Back page arrows, a button to
	take you to the index, a button to go back,
	a button to take you to a master doc if
	you have a suite of pdfs on CD / web,
	a button to bring up the search facility,
	etc.

As an example of what can be done, take a look at this:

http://www.tp4.ruhr-uni-bochum.de/SoftwareDocs/pdfsc/manual-screen.pdf

(this is actually the manual to C.V. Radhakrishnan's
pdfscreen package for LaTeX, which he has very kindly
made available for free). I've done something similar,
but with our corporate look-and-feel and some other
changes (sadly I'm not allowed to show them in
public).

If you have a lot of maths, tables, and so on, then
a format where you can control the actual the actual
output (on screen or paper) is very useful. I admit it
is not the only way to present information, or the
best in every case; but it has its place (my next task
is to produce nice html/webby output from my
docs database in addition to screen-friendly PDF and
print-friendly PDF).

So all in all it seems a little unfair to criticize a format
for the fact that many people just sling a black and white
A4 sized PDF on the web instead of taking the time
to design a more suitable style.

Tom Murrell agrees that PDFs can be well designed
with care, but then says he doesn't like proprietary
formats. Again, this is not quite true; Adobe own the format,
which is good in that it prevents proliferation of vendor
specific "improvements", but publish the spec and
do not prevent other people providing software to
read and write it (many free software packages do so).
So not entirely "free" (as in speech) but certainly it
can be free (as in beer). 

HTH,
Chris.

Christopher Gooch, Technical Author
LightWork Design, Sheffield, UK.
www.lightworkdesign.com
SIGGRAPH 2003...Booth 3431...San Diego, California...29-31 July 2003


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