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Comment by seemaze | Hacker News Reader

While I enjoy the content, I find myself surprisingly annoyed at choice of PDF as the format. It's the worst of both traditional and web publication modes; low accessibility AND low portability

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This isn't the first time I've read a comment criticizing PDF, but it is the first time I can recall the Portable Document Format (PDF) being accused of low portability.

I'd call it low-portability. They're designed for large screens yet they're often viewed on phones where you need to manually zoom in and view each page some tiny portion at a time.

Was at a restaurant with a QR code that led to a PDF if their paper menu. It was horrible. For reference it was the Ralph Lauren Cafe in Omotesando Tokyo.

I'd prefer a static PDF I can pinch, zoom, and move about on my own than some crappy, overwrought, slow, "mobile" website that forces me to jump around to different sections of the menu with links that it *hides* anytime I scroll, which of course I have to because only 3 menu items are going to be able to fit on the screen at a time.

All that, VS a PDF that shows the entire menu that I can navigate spatially, show as much as I want depending on light levels, interest, and screen size, and can all fit in one, static tab.

Of course, the real answer is that electronic menus at sit down restaurants opened with QR codes are trash. Paper never really had these problems unless the restaurant was bad at menu design. I dislike being forced to use my phone at all when I'm out with friends or family for a nice dinner. Growing up, if I used my phone at the dinner table I would've been scolded.

Covid probably had something to do with the PDF menu trend. I think we can go back to printed menus now.

PDFs were born to make real life documents manageable in digital form, that is, letter, legal, A4 etc; nothing that would (and could) have been used on a phone back then. If they don't display properly on a phone I'd say it's on the phone itself. They're not computers usability-wise, not even close: too many compromises with ergonomics, information density and readability fighting against each other in the name of portability. That restaurant had sloppy management/techies, as finding that the .pdf was the wrong size would probably take ten seconds to any of them, the correct the problem by having the QR point to a correctly sized .pdf generated automatically by reading the same db the bigger .pdf was created from. PC sees the link to the bigger one, phone reads the QR containing a link to the mobile one. not hard at all to solve, it's not a .pdf format fault.

Dynamically generating PDFs on the fly based on the user’s screen size sounds downright Kafkaesque. I feel a deep sense of dread any time I have to touch PDF-rendering code. Any halfway decent CMS (or just plain old HTML and CSS) can easily create a good-looking, responsive, accessible webpage with a fraction of the work. Leaning on PDFs in this case is a classic example of, “When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.”

The PDF format can’t necessarily be blamed for its inability to be responsive to screen size, but that’s one of several good reasons to discourage the use of PDFs for purely digital documents. Its design is linked to a specific historical context, and it should be limited to that context.

(Of course, I imagine the actual reason for the PDF is that it’s just an export of the InDesign/Photoshop/whatever file that was used to create the original paper menus. There probably is no “database.”)

> Any halfway decent CMS (or just plain old HTML and CSS) can easily create a good-looking, responsive, accessible webpage with a fraction of the work.

Easily? Because it's not a fraction of the work. Let's just assume you mean to use someone else's solution (of the literal thousands, each with their own quirks), to make your bespoke website.

PDFs have a standard. Libraries to resize are not difficult to find. Most people are able to run a PDF through their printer driver for a resize, because it's a solved problem.

I would say creating a job that outputs a bunch of PDFs is going to be easier than a build system for different devices (CMS or not), every time.

Sure, they can render at different resolutions, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen a PDF that has a responsive layout. A restaurant website is probably going to use some very user-friendly CMS like Squarespace that can absolutely provide you with easy responsive layouts.

A pdf should not reflow nor be responsive. Aside from zoom/pan, how else could you possibly interact? I think it works fantastic, like holding a magnifying glass and panning around a surface

https://helpx.adobe.com/acrobat/using/reading-pdfs-reflow-ac...

Oh wow, that’s awful. ‘Like the web, but on a pdf and done entirely by Adobe.’

That's exactly why they're saying it's "not responsive". It wasn't designed to be, and it's not.

PDF is over 30 years old. I’m pretty sure people had different idea of „portable” back then. It’s still really good for printing…

When the PDF is a version of the paper menu, we can understand they only produced one version, and the alternative was no digital version at all (which is the case for an awful lot of restaurant)

If it's PDF or nothing, I'll be glad to take the PDF.

Large screen phone + landscape mode if needed usually works for me.

Yeah that is ironic regarding both the name, and the fact that it's one of the most viewable formats on any given system.

> most viewable

It is, but the UX trying to read a A4/letter sized PDF document on a phone is absolutely horrible.

This is basically the same reason I think sports cars are horrible... trying to fit a 10 ton roll of steel in the backseat is nearly impossible.

No one wants to carry a 10 tons rol of steel in a sports car. The majority of people getting a PDF on their phone though, do want to be able to read the information in it easily and they can't.

So no, that's not the same type of complaint

It shouldn't be. 10 tons of steel takes up just about 1,300 litres. That should fit nicely in the back seat. Remember to secure your load.

> Remember to secure your load

I don't know much about steel coils, and I'm hoping that something that fits in your back seat isn't as dangerous as those featured in YouTube videos, but the idea that the primary concern is just strapping the thing down is kinda funny

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RC6pn8n7MeY

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/kDGfk-dOjq8

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=steel+coil+unwi...

only a4 sized pdf.

You can make a phone-sized PDF and it'll be just fine.

it's not the file format.

And then the experience on a larger screen will be bad.

It is, unless PDF supports reflow?

By design it doesn't. It is a stated goal.

Shouldn't "portable" in the context of a document format mean "comfortably viewable on most systems" rather than "yeah you can view it but it's gonna suck and you'll get eye strain"?

I believe this is called "responsive design", a useful but differentiated concept.

It's pretty cool how PDFs don't typically load resources from an external website or CDN. They are self-contained, and thus demonstrably portable.

Gross analogy: Have you ever been to a multi-day music festival? A port-o-potty in the dark is disgusting, but still somewhat useable compared the alternative of going to the bathroom in public. PDF artifacts are in the same ballpark.

Also, I think I'd personally dislike a "portable document format" that doesn't look identical on all systems. By making it visually identical everywhere, you of course sacrifice comfort on smaller screens by nature. But to me that's an acceptable tradeoff for knowing I'm looking at the document, as it was intended to be displayed. I don't think of PDFs the way I think of websites. My physical papers don't reflow text.

> low accessibility AND low portability

The two main pain points everyone said PDF had solved for documents, when it was introduced.

A growing horror is how Windows handles them. On a Mac they open and work fine, but on Windows they grind the system to a halt. What’s going on?

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