It strikes me as ironic that the same U.S. government that went after Bill Gates on anti-trust grounds for bundling IE with Windows has all but establshed an information trust favoring Adobe’s Acrobat. Every freaking government document that I’ve tried to access of late has been a .pdf file. All hail Adobe. Not.
I don’t do .pdf files. Web-surfing is supposed to be fast, and web pages are supposed to be quickly accessible. That, after all, is the point of having government information available online: accessibility. But .pdf files are neither fast nor accessible, since they make a user wait while Acrobat loads, checks for updates and then loads the requested page.
In this increasingly laptop-oriented web world, Acrobat files are anachronisms. They bog down a system, requiring laptop users to spare extra memory to read a web page that should’ve (and, inevitably, could have) been written in HTML, anyway.
Then, too, there’s the jam factor. At least two out of every three times I try accessing a .pdf file (always with the same stupid optimism), my system crashes and I lose everything else I was working on at the time.
I have to wonder: what idiot governmental employee decided that this was the way to deliver data to citizens in the “information age”?
Monday, January 24th, 2005, 12:24 pm | 
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January 24, 2005 at 12:39 pm
Amen. I see Acrobat opening, nine times out of ten I hit cancel.
January 24, 2005 at 12:44 pm
Redundancy alert! Redundancy alert!
January 24, 2005 at 12:45 pm
There are non-Adobe PDF readers, aren’t there?
PDF *does* have advantages; it never gets screwed over by someone’s broken HTML renderer, and you can trivially put images in the document itself, which you can’t do with plain generic HTML. (Yeah, IE can save a .mht archive, but that’s even more proprietary than PDF, so…)
Google’s PDF view-as-html feature is your friend in such situations. (Or, heh, an iBook with Apple’s lightweight PDF viewer.)
January 24, 2005 at 12:53 pm
I agree that government use of pdfs has gotten out of hand, but I have to say; I prefer .pdf files for long documents because I can download and take a .pdf document with me on the road in a very short time. Can’t download 135 html pages. I read quite a few public legal docs, and the indexing and linking features of Acrobat also make it easier to find info in a pdf.
January 24, 2005 at 2:25 pm
Why not switch off the “update on startup” option instead of moaning about it?
January 24, 2005 at 3:05 pm
I LOVE .pdf’s!!! Apple’s Preview reads pdf’s much faster than Acrobat, but I like Acrobat, too. pdf’s are about the only way to control how a form will apear and print on another’s computer. There is no substitute in my opinion.
January 24, 2005 at 5:00 pm
PDFs may be overused, but when you’re needing to put a form (legal document) online, PDF is AFAIK the only way to do it and make sure you preserve the language.
January 24, 2005 at 10:50 pm
Actually, if you hold the control key down while clicking to open a pdf file (either a link or an actual file) it doesn’t do all of the updating and checking, and opens MUCH FASTER. Just a thought…
January 24, 2005 at 11:52 pm
I like the fact I can download really big multipage reports like the 234 page MemoGate Report. And Preview does a decent job for what I want, easy to get to the page I want. And if the text is too small, I can enlarge it easily.
I don’t even have Adobe Acrobat on m Macs, don’t need it.
January 25, 2005 at 2:11 am
As much as I tend to agree that PDF is drastically overused online, it _does_ have uses for which it is demonstrably superior to html…most notably for any document whose primary utility can be presumed to involve printing. (PDF is the perfect format for tax forms, for example…at least it will be for as long as only pre-certified preparation agencies can submit them electronically.) For the distribution of printable material online PDF has no superior.
That being said, there _does_ seem to be a lot of confusion about what PDF is for.
January 25, 2005 at 3:05 pm
ev,
TRY DOWNLOADING THE FILE TO YOUR DESKTOP FIRST THIS WILL INCREASE THE CHANCES OF FASTEROPENINGS. aLSO SWITCH YOUR BROWSER TO “FIREFOX”. iT IS SOOOOO FAST AND YOU WILL LIKE IT QUICK.
http://www.firefox.com
later,
k
January 26, 2005 at 9:17 am
Also, as much as I hate Adobe Reader, Reader 7.0 is a *huge* improvement over 6.0. 6 was always a slow nightmare, but 7.0 finally gets it right.
And PDF is technically an open standard – based off of PostScript.
January 29, 2005 at 6:56 pm
PDFs are great because, not only does it preserve the layout on your screen,
but if you want to print the document it will print with the original layout as well.
I’ll take pdfs over Word files ANY day. Just make sure you set your options in
Acrobat to disable the crap you don’t want… or check out some of the alternate
pdf viewers out there.
January 30, 2005 at 9:23 am
i also hate that those things jam up my browser and cause my system to seize. i have found some relief by deleting the .tmp files in :\documents and settings\yourusername\local settings\temp
see
http://www.duxcw.com/yabbse/in.....40;start=0
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