Rendering a Microsoft Word/Powerpoint document as a PDF is a good thing as then one does not need a Doc/Docx/PPT/pptx viewer anymore while most devices come with a PDF viewer builtin (eg. Chrome :) (and as a bonus it kills the anims if they are there) this while keeping the formatting intact (some minor color changes though depending on one export it).

I tend to keep a whole bunch of things I want to 'read later' in my iBooks collection, just save as PDF and transfer to phone, or if already a PDF just download it directly; zooms great too. I got all kinds of device manuals, but also PADI and other diving reference books; always good to quickly check up on it when in doubt and then to reinforce that information with the knowledge of your dive buddy.

Indeed, for content that does not really need a layout outside of some headers (<h1>) and paragraphs (<p>) HTML is perfectly fine.

Quite a few text portions of conference papers (read: Tex :) can be rendered as markdown and then easily converted to HTML, but it won't feel 'as well', thus PDF is a easier format that also reflects the original intent and format.

IETF RFCs typically can be rendered in a myriad of ways thanks to xml2rfc, then again, one mostly will end up reading them from tools.ietf.org or to keep local, render as PDF and load it into iBooks.

PDF is beautiful. Long live PDF.

I read a lot. I don't always want to read from a screen.

Making PDF's available on the internet just saves me from having to search through a journal stack.

PDF's have the advantange of the formatting looks good, and the author/publisher gets to choose how it looks. Usually with input from a professional. This is much better than the "styling" many websites and epubs provide.

A few weeks ago I would have made the same statement but I started reading the PDF implementation docs and now I really like the format.

The main issue I think we all have with the format is that people make docs that are almost impossible to read on a small screen.

There are ways around this: 1. Tagged PDFs present the underlying content and semantics in order to reflow for accessibility purposes though right now very few people seems to use this feature and 2. Maybe it wouldn't be a bad thing to make PDF pages closer to a paperback book rather than an A4 page with the resulting shorter line length and reduced margins.

PDF is indeed more complex than plain HTML with some cribbed CSS but in many ways it's a lot better: 1. It truly in portable in the sense that every computer will render it in exactly the same way, 2. It packages up all assets in an efficient manner (only the glyphs that are needed are included, not the entire font with all glyphs and position hints like web fonts), 3. The expensive layout computation is done once, on a computer in a galaxy far far away from my battery limited phone, and 4. PDFs are (by convention) free from all of the cacophony of crap like share buttons and navigation chrome and ads and articles-you-may-enjoy fluff.

The format itself is actually not that bad, it's a text format in that it's relatively easy to open up a text editor and bang one out. The only inconveniences are the places where you need to state exactly how long strings are (which your text editor can help with) and the creation of the index at the end (which I've been cheating by just running my hand created PDFs through a PDF lint-like utility.

The reason why most PDFs look crazy when opened up in a text editor is that the streams are almost always compressed. You can uncompress with them "qpdf --stream-data=uncompress in.pdf out.pdf"

I find PDF to be way more portable than most other document formats in terms of saving a document or for printing a document. Saving an HTML page has it's own set of problems, and if I share it I have to make sure to get all the images gathered as well. Word processor documents depend on system fonts, etc., and I cannot be sure that what my document depends on is installed on the other computer. With a PDF, I can be sure to get the necessary elements, be them font, images, etc.

Finally, in 2017, when PDF became abundant, does not require additional drivers to use it, has somewhat usable spec, and a lot of 3rd party and open source software to work with do we really need to get rid of it?

Bashing PDF is so 2000...

My first thought on this is that EPUB is not fully portable either ... it's just non-portable in a different set of circumstances. If you want to publish on the internet, for general consumption, just use plain html. That's about as portable as you can get without moving into raw text.

The point of the story is as follows:

> PDF is not portable on digital screens. It doesn’t scale. It’s not comfortable to read PDF files on a mobile or ebook readers

Arguing that PDFs are good for printing out, or better than some other format, doesn't actually address the issue ;-)

1a. .pdf is a fine format.

1b. unless -- as is increasingly the case these days -- you're reading it on a screen smaller than the one for which the .pdf was designed, in which case .pdf is an awful format.

2a. .epub is a fine format.

2b. unless you're reading it in a viewer-app which is wonky, which most of them are. (the inconsistencies of rendering with this so-called "standard" are unbelievably bad, and seem to be getting worse rather than better as time goes on.)

3a. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of a .pdf, you often get some really bad stuff that loses a lot of important styling.

3b. when you try to re-use text by copying it out of an .epub, it's not much better.

4a. the standard line is that an .epub is just "a website packaged into a .zip file", implying that anything you can do on a website can be done in an .epub.

4b. the standard line is a lie. an .epub requires .xhtml rather than .html, and a complex mess of associated files, and most .epub viewer-apps have trouble supporting the full gamut of .css, and also do not allow you to use javascript at all.

conclusion: the state of sharing documents on the web in a way that allows offline use while enabling the convenient re-use of text is a sad state indeed.

PDF a perfectly portable in the digital world (the only world in which it has ever existed.)

It's not perfectly optimized for every display (or print page, the two being equivalent) size, resolution, etc., but then neither is any other format that can handle the same range of content, nor will any format ever be until we have AI layout that does as good as professional layout from a single source file for all media sizes and properties.

I find professionally laid out PDFs that are designed for letter/A4 size pages to superior in practical use to any reflowable format I've yet seen at pretty much every size for most content more complex than plain linear text like you'd find in a novel. (Smartphone and smaller devices aren't great for it, but then they aren't great for reading content more complex than linear text regardless of format.)

Most devices include a PDF reader, but not an EPUB reader. Yes, you can download one, but as a publisher, you can't expect your readers to jump through that hoop.

Instead of calling for a 'ban' on a format by very much subjective reasons, how about calling for publication in multiple formats, so the people have a choice? It is certainly not much more work, and it looks in my humble opinion, professional.

I'm understanding hard time understand some of the point this article makes; particularly the claim about that you need to think about typesetting and design more. Most of word processors these day have some type of style system that akin to HTML.

PDF is also one of few formats that is readily available that has a well defined archival spec (PDF/A) which further makes it more compatible across the readers. (As essentially it requires documents follow certain specs.)

Do you publish on the Internet? Do you read a lot of publications on your digital devices?

How about stopping using PDF for internet publications and using EPUB instead (or some other screen independent format)? Please, share your comments.

I think the format itself could be ok, but not in its current format.

The PDF header can be anywhere in the document. This makes parsing for bad content harder. (Also, you can have a valid pdf that is also a valid zip with the contents being the original file. How do you virus scan this?)

To many old image formats allowed, with readers only supporting a subset. Tiff alone has a bunch of options that are often broken. What happens when you put a multipage tiff in a pdf? (I think you just see the first page in Reader but some other reader might allow you browse them)

Lots of features in later versions that are not well supported. (forms, document libraries, scripting?)

It has been while since I left the document area but while I liked simple PDFs, once you say you support them, you have to support all of them which is almost impossible to do correctly. The later specs just have too many features that are almost unused but add a lot of complexity that really isn't needed in a portable document format. A stripped down/cleaned up version of the spec would be nice.

The share buttons and navigation chrome certainly can be put in a PDF, they're just incredibly uncommon. I've even played video games that were distributed as PDF files.