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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

Well don't leave us in suspense, why isn't PDF a suitable replacement?

* If your internal workflow is designing documents then the conversion to a web document will be clunky at best.

* Every end-user device has a PDF reader and their web browser probably opens it transparently.

* You need the PDF either way way because the website will never be the authoritative source so now you have the problem of making sure they don't get out of sync.

* You probably have a few internal graphic designers that can do wonders with print but it's unlikely you have an internal web development team.

* It's much easier to make a PDF accessible than a website. (Before you disagree remember that the offices we're talking about likely don't have a dedicated web designer) You can be sure it will print correctly, and for most users it's automatically offline.

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> Well don't leave us in suspense, why isn't PDF a suitable replacement?

I'm pretty sure the team at Gov.uk wrote a pretty decent article on this topic.

Since I was specifically asked, yes, the OP covers my main arguments quite nicely. But in essence, I would argue the web is content-oriented, and the PDF is not.

For example,

1. The web is a medium where you cannot (within reason) exercise too much control over the design of things. You lay out general guidelines that tell the browser how to render whatever content is thrown at it. I won't pretend this gets us predictable design, but at least it's uniform, which is good for human consumption.

2. The web is a medium that lends itself to structural document construction in such a way that it is easy to use and reuse the content in ways not anticipated. This is good for machine consumption, which in turn empowers the human.

These arguments may seem philosophical, but they do have real-world effects. Once I managed to explain it in ways the customer understood, they were always eager to be of assistance in the endeavour.

As long as we're speaking in idealistic terms I pretty much agree with you but when you compare websites and PDFs that exist in practice it tells a different story.

Zooming PDFs on mobile can be a pain but it's certainly less of a pain than using some fixed width site from the early 2000s with a jQuery menu you can only operate with a mouse and links so small that a mouse would fat finger them.

Machine consumption of the documents is one of those benefits that sounds cool but really just boils down to SEO because very few other things are going to be scraping your site. Certainly worth something but it's usually not high on the priority list for governments and search bots scrape PDFs anyway.

I think the main point in favor of the web is that you can have multiple presentation layers for the same underlying content and you can improve presentation independently of content. Not necessarily that it's reusable because that's just templates and a style guide but that you can backport all your fixes.

Because you are building a web site? I mean, I think there's some things that are evident about those, and one of them is that they're not PDF's.

All the issues you stated stem from the fact that people don't want to change. Just because it's not the easiest way doesn't mean it's not a good one.

Everyone that can design a PDF can learn to design a nice HTML document.

Seems a little tautological. I mean the web is certainly an interlinked set of documents but nothing really says they have to be HTML. I mean people around here link to arXiv all the time and that's essentially just a repository of PDFs. Browsers just get you to the content, doesn't mean it has to be able to display all of it.

I don't think it's that people don't want to change, you're still going to need print designs regardless and it's much easier to host a print design than it is to convert a website into one.

> Everyone that can design a PDF can learn to design a nice HTML document.

I mean I wish that was true. I think people can learn to write content in a web compatible way but a designer that spends all their time in PS and ID isn't going to suddenly be able to crank out high quality web pages.

Not suddenly, no, but with training? Sure. HTML is not rocket surgery.

> you're still going to need print designs regardless

Hopefully not forever.

> accessible

Let's take perhaps the simplest most important accessibility feature: How do I increase the font size without making the content absurdly wide, while viewing a PDF?

As a visually impaired user, this is my single biggest gripe with PDFs. Its also annoying that zooming on many websites completely breaks the layout, often overlapping text or pushing important elements off of the screen. I find this particularly sad, since HTML largely supports a separation of content and presentation.

In the Adobe Reader app for Android on the bottom right you can select multiple 'view modes' one called 'Reader Mode' which will allow you to reflow a document and increase the font size considerably. I capped it out at about a letter per screen.

Trying to read a PDF on a mobile device is usually painful.

Sure, but that's because mobile devices have really small screens. You could create PDFs that were meant to be viewed at that size, but why?

You'd have the same problem trying to read a regular book through a mobile-phone-sized window. That doesn't make books an unsuitable vehicle for document delivery.

It does make it an unsuitable vehicle for delivery of information which people may want to access from a mobile device, however.

Not at all; there is no information that people won't want to access from a mobile device. But again, a mobile device is not necessarily suitable for the job.

Telling your customers to carry a laptop/tablet because you feel linebreaks are just a nice-to-have is quite user-hostile.

PDFs have line breaks.

> a mobile device is not necessarily suitable for the job.

Certainly not if the publishers took that attitude. And what you consider suitable simply isn't relevant if half the audience is now using a mobile device.

Mobile devices works perfectly well for accessing this kind of information when developers aren't outright hostile to the users they are meant to serve.

It's not a developers job to tell me whether or not my device is suitable for reading their information because they can't be bothered to make it available as HTML.

HTML will wrap the text to fit the page. PDFs don't do that.

Adobe's PDF viewer will actually do that. Check it out if you're frustrated by PDFs on mobile.

Opening PDFs on an iOS device doesn’t work transparently - you have to open them with iBooks which is a super awkward workflow.

If you click on a link to a .pdf in Safari on iOS (certainly on iOS 11, but I'm pretty sure many versions prior to that) it will transparently show the PDF within the browser (it's a fast native PDF viewer that can be zoomed/scrolled very easily).

Only if you're using some 3rd-party app that doesn't support PDF rendering. Apple's Safari and Files both handle them in-app.

Not for me. I’m not sure what’s up then.

It's possible there's a size limit, but I remember waiting a fair bit of time for large PDFs to load in Safari, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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