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Web site design philosophy: .html and . pdf

Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.

I am inclined to the view that this approach conflicts with what I
have regarded as the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web as
originally designed, namely the use of hypertext/hyperlinks to get
deeper and deeper into a topic or to depart to some other linked site
to pursue another avenue of knowledge on a topic.

My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place. It takes a lot more time to re-create
every page of a supplied document into html with the pages having less
visual impact than with a pdf file. Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents.. Broadband use: slow
dial up is dying and therefore so are slower downloads.

I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,

Best wishes, John Morgan
Jul 24 '05 #1
25 2779
On Tue, 24 May 2005 20:11:28 GMT, John Morgan <jf*@XXwoodlander.co.uk> wrote:
I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,


Design for the world wide web includes targetting visual display, but also many
other ways of rendering the content (think speech and aural browsers, braille,
plain text browsers, Googlebot :-) ) I think a good design is optimized for the
masses, but doesn't exclude any of the exceptions.

With plain html one can serve the content to all. One can use CSS to create a
beautiful desing (fluid of course) to be visually attractive and keep accessible
and usable for visitors who have no need or use for visually attractive designs.
PDF caters the masses. The down side is that using pdf excluded many users and
pisses of those who are still on dial-up (and that is a significant amount of
people, especially if you think internationally).

I think that any designer who thinks s/he needs pdf to keep the design as
designed, has no proper understanding of what the www is or does a bad job or
both.

--
,-- --<--@ -- PretLetters: 'woest wyf', met vele interesses: ----------.
| weblog | http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/_private/weblog.html |
| webontwerp | http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/html/webontwerp.html |
|zweefvliegen | http://home.wanadoo.nl/b.de.zoete/html/vliegen.html |
`-------------------------------------------------- --<--@ ------------'

Jul 24 '05 #2
Barbara de Zoete wrote:
using pdf excluded many users and pisses of those who are still on dial-up


It annoys people who aren't on dial up too. Problems include:

* Having to spawn another piece of software to view a document.
* Not having text flow to fit the window.
* Having to scroll up and down and up and down and up and ... in the case of
documents with columns.
* PDF viewers being simply slower to render documents then web browsers.
* Not being about to use http://amb.vis.ne.jp/mozilla/scrapbook/
* The difficulty in copy/pasting from many PDF documents

The list is endless.
--
David Dorward <http://blog.dorward.me.uk/> <http://dorward.me.uk/>
Home is where the ~/.bashrc is
Jul 24 '05 #3

"John Morgan"
I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,


Your friend is talking out of his nether regions.

Take his advice at your professional peril.

The only reasons to go the way he is describing are:

1) Laziness
2) Arrogance
3) Ignorance
Jul 24 '05 #4
John Morgan wrote:
Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer.
That's your first problem. :-)
Unless you're very lucky, professional graphics designers and
appropriate Web design are oil and water. I predict you're in for a real
interesting time.I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.
From the graphics designers standpoint that's perfectly logical. It
gives them the kind of control over the finished product they regard as
essential. With pdf you can do the sort of pixel-precise design that
they're used to.

To a conventional graphics designer the notion that he or she cannot
have complete control over the appearance of the page makes them
severely twitchy. The idea it is a good thing to allow the user to
determine appearance strikes them as absolutely insane.

Of course from the standpoint of the Web it's usually a very bad
solution. In fact if you look at most of the worst horrors that were
inflicted on the Web five or ten years ago, you'll find they were
generally perpetrated either by graphics designers or by people who were
striving to emulate the pixel-precise design of glossy magazines.
I am inclined to the view that this approach conflicts with what I
have regarded as the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web as
originally designed, namely the use of hypertext/hyperlinks to get
deeper and deeper into a topic or to depart to some other linked site
to pursue another avenue of knowledge on a topic.
Keep in mind that the 'fundamental idea of the World Wide Web' conflicts
with everything graphic designers are taught -- and what most of them
regard as the fundamental philosophy of their calling.
My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place.
In other words, the guy is completely lost and trying to turn the Web
into something it is not -- a printed page. This may be incompetence on
his part because he simply doesn't know how to do an HTML page, or it
may be a severe case of culture shock. In either case the result is
likely to be about as practical as an amphibious squid.

(Note that pdf on the Web is not inherently a bad thing. For example if
you're offering something meant to be downloaded and printed off it
makes sense. You can even make a half-assed case for taking something
like a large printed catalog and making it available on the Web very
quickly and inexpensively. But you lose some of the critically important
advantages of the Web by doing this.)

It takes a lot more time to re-create every page of a supplied document into html with the pages having less
visual impact than with a pdf file.
This is the critical question. Who is going to have to maintain this
monstrosity? If you're sure that your designer buddy is going to be
doing the day-to-day grunt work, and the time it takes to produce
updates is not going to impact you professionally, well -- it's his karma.

If anyone else is going to have to maintain the pages, that's very
different. And if, as is usually the case, the 'web guy' rather than the
designer gets stuck with the maintaince, you should fight this nonsense
tooth and nail.

Security of content - a lot less people will be able to steal text from documents.
Which merely confirms what you had already implied. This person is --
shall we say, 'delightfully naive'? -- about the Internet.

.. Broadband use: slow dial up is dying and therefore so are slower downloads.
Again, this is typical graphic-designer think. They don't understand the
effect of presentation time on the impact of a web page. Specifically
they don't understand that for every second it takes your page to load,
you lose a fraction of your potential audience. And of course pdf files
take a significant amount of time to load even over a broadband
connection -- especially the first one when the Acrobat reader has to load.


I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,
I have been in the business of producing documents (from newspapers to
novels) for something over 40 years. In that time I have dealt with a
lot of graphic designers. I have to say your experience is not untypical.

Graphic design is a highly skilled craft with a good bit of artistry
included. Graphic designers can do wonderful work, but the fundamental
requirement, no matter now skilled the practitioner, is that the graphic
designer _must_ understand the medium he or she is working in.

This was even a problem in newspapers in the 60s. It is a huge problem
today because the Web is so utterly different from any other medium
graphic designers work in. Most of them are anywhere from
comprehension-impaired to utterly clueless when it comes to designing
for the Web.

Your designer is so badly culture-shocked, he is attempting to turn your
Web site into a series of printed pages (pdf files). This is stupid,
self-defeating and ultimately is going to cause a whole lot of grief.

Your best bet is to work with this person and educate him about the
realities of the Web and Web design. If your designer can't adapt to the
realities of Web design, he needs to be replaced. If you can't do that,
at least get a memo in the written record detailing your objections
("severe reservations" is a good phrase to use) about this approach and
warning of the consequences.
Best wishes, John Morgan


Good luck. You're going to need it.

--RC
Jul 24 '05 #5
On Tue, 24 May 2005 20:11:28 GMT, John Morgan <jf*@XXwoodlander.co.uk>
wrote:
I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files.


Sack this "designer" immediately
Jul 24 '05 #6
On Tue, 24 May 2005, Rick Cook wrote:
John Morgan wrote:
Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer.
That's your first problem. :-)


Indeed.
Unless you're very lucky, professional graphics designers and
appropriate Web design are oil and water. I predict you're in for a
real interesting time.
It *should* not take luck. Very few web page designers are strong in
both the content design and the visual presentation departments - but
a sybiosis of the two, with due deference to their respective fields
of expertise, can be a killer, and management should be aware of that,
or it's high time they learned it.

Any management which lets the one overrule the other in matters which
they don't understand, should be doomed to failure, in WWW terms.
Unfortuantely some of the billion-budget corporations have forced
their stuff onto the WWW to such an extent that minor players are
using their bad example as a paradigm of proper web design, instead of
following good www design principles, so the bad habits tend to get
propagated...
From the graphics designers standpoint that's perfectly logical. It
gives them the kind of control over the finished product they regard
as essential.
That dread word "control". Which of course on the WWW they do not
have, so they should be ruled out of web design unless/until they're
willing to adapt.
To a conventional graphics designer the notion that he or she cannot
have complete control over the appearance of the page makes them
severely twitchy. The idea it is a good thing to allow the user to
determine appearance strikes them as absolutely insane.


Quite, and that's the only bit that management have to understand in
order to deploy the right people for the job.

Thanks for a fine followup, I'm bookmarking it and will surely quote
it soon, somewhere.
Jul 24 '05 #7
John Morgan wrote:
Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.


There are surely SOME times when this is the right approach.

There are surely RARE times when this is the right approach.


Jul 24 '05 #8
AES
In article <F4********************@rogers.com>,
C A Upsdell <""cupsdellXXX\"@-@-@XXXupsdell.com"> wrote:
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.


There are surely SOME times when this is the right approach.

There are surely RARE times when this is the right approach.

As a frequent (even if amateur-level) both user and supplier of web
content I agree strongly with those comments -- but can there not be
some way to solve this problem with technology?

PDF format is just so useful for storing files on your HD -- so easy to
read PDF files on screen from your HD -- so easy to create from
essentially any other application -- so widely used by journals,
vendors, etc, as a distribution medium for all kinds of material -- so
easy to email -- so nearly free from cross-platform problems (as
compared to Word, PowerPoint, etc) -- so good as a seminar presentation
medium -- just so competent overall that it's my standard format for
storing, sending and presenting information.

(And of course Reader is as universal as it is free.)

So, nearly all the electronically stored stuff on my HD is created or
acquired and saved in PDF. In fact, when I encounter an HTML site on
the web that I want to capture for future offline reading or reference,
I don't download the HTML and read it offline using a browser; I use
Acrobat's Web Capture to download and capture it as a PDF document.

And even though I have adequate beginner's competence in HTML and tools
for creating it if need be, I want to share my stuff or make my stuff
available on the web primarily in PDF, or at least straight from PDF by
a one-click route.

So, let's get the tools to make PDF "a right approach" -- or at least an
OK approach -- for the web, by either:

1) Getting browsers that are much faster and more competent in
downloading PDF from the web, or

2) Making it really easy to autoconvert PDF documents straight into
HTML pages for putting stuff on a web site. (Acrobat can apparently do
something like this -- but Acrobat's online Help is not at all helpful
in saying how.)
Jul 24 '05 #9
AES wrote:
So, nearly all the electronically stored stuff on my HD is created or
acquired and saved in PDF. In fact, when I encounter an HTML site on
the web that I want to capture for future offline reading or reference,
I don't download the HTML and read it offline using a browser; I use
Acrobat's Web Capture to download and capture it as a PDF document. And even though I have adequate beginner's competence in HTML and tools
for creating it if need be, I want to share my stuff or make my stuff
available on the web primarily in PDF, or at least straight from PDF by
a one-click route.


Let me get back to you, will you? I'm trying to find you a 12-step
program for recovery. ;)

--
Blinky Linux Registered User 297263
Killing all Usenet posts from Google Groups
Info: http://blinkynet.net/comp/uip5.html
Jul 24 '05 #10
AES wrote:
In article <F4********************@rogers.com>,
C A Upsdell <""cupsdellXXX\"@-@-@XXXupsdell.com"> wrote:

site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.
There are surely SOME times when this is the right approach.

There are surely RARE times when this is the right approach.


As a frequent (even if amateur-level) both user and supplier of web
content I agree strongly with those comments -- but can there not be
some way to solve this problem with technology?


Yes. Use the appropriate technology for the job. The appropriate
technology for a document to be served over the Web and read online by
many users with many different systems is NOT pdf.

PDF is wonderful if you have a 200-page document to be downloaded,
printed out and read offline. You'll notice that there are a lot of
those on the Web. You'll notice there are a whole lot fewer sites that
serve all their contents as pdf.

This is, as Karl Marx used to say, no accident.

<snip>

So, let's get the tools to make PDF "a right approach" -- or at least an
OK approach -- for the web, by either:

1) Getting browsers that are much faster and more competent in
downloading PDF from the web, or
PDF is not adaptive and that's part of the point. HTML and its cousins
are adaptive and that's _their_ point. Using Acrobat to do the job of
HTML is a mistake and if you keep it up long enough it gets very expensive.

Of course if you're an amateur with a few simple sites it can take a
long time for those particular chickens to come home to roost. If you're
trying to maintain a large corporate site with thousands of complex
documents you'll figure out the problems _real_ fast.

To get a feel for the problem, go to a site belonging to one of those
companies that tried to save money by putting their printed catalog on
the Web as a collection of pdf files and see the contortions you would
have to go through to order something.
2) Making it really easy to autoconvert PDF documents straight into
HTML pages for putting stuff on a web site. (Acrobat can apparently do
something like this -- but Acrobat's online Help is not at all helpful
in saying how.)


Now why do you suppose that is? (Hint: It's not an accident and Adobe is
not being deliberately obtuse.)

--RC
Jul 24 '05 #11
John Morgan wrote:
Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.

All my comments below are directed toward your graphics friend.

Your graphics designer has to be reminded: "it's the content, stupid".

People don't really care what a web site looks like, if the information
is what they are after then accessibility is the key. HTML is designed
first and foremost to provide access, PDF is designed for consistent
layout and has no pretensions at all regarding accessibility.

PDF is a proprietary format that has taken to mimicking features of
HTML in an attempt to achieve a limited accessibility - what does that
tell you about it?
I am inclined to the view that this approach conflicts with what I
have regarded as the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web as
originally designed, namely the use of hypertext/hyperlinks to get
deeper and deeper into a topic or to depart to some other linked site
to pursue another avenue of knowledge on a topic.
Absolutely on the money.

My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place. It takes a lot more time to re-create
every page of a supplied document into html with the pages having less
visual impact than with a pdf file.
True, but "it's the content, stupid". People really don't care about
the layout beyond that it is simple and easy to use, they *do* care
about the information.

Regardless how good Brittany Spears may look, I don't buy her music. I
don't care that Mark Knopfler is a wrinkly old guy, I've got nearly all
his albums because I like his music.

And I don't have any Kylie albums either... :-(
Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents..
Complete hogwash. Anything worth 'stealing' will be simply copied -
your designer friend realises that the PDF documents are downloaded to
users' PCs?

Anyone who downloads it has already effectively stolen it.

Not to mention that many (most?) search engines decipher PDFs and offer
HTML versions of the document.
Broadband use: slow
dial up is dying and therefore so are slower downloads.
Ugghh. I have broadband, but I would much rather download a 40KB HTML
file than the equivalent 5MB PDF with embedded fonts, etc. Can I turn
of the images in a PDF? Use my own style sheet using my fonts at the
sizes I can read? These are all accessibility issues addressed by HTML
that PDF does not and likely will never address.

(I note that text-to-speech and other accessibility issues have
already been mentioned, just thought I'd toss my $0.02 worth in...).

I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,


PDF is useful for say manuals that users download and read off-line.
Using PDF for general web pages is totally not what the web is about.

Graphic designers are great, and good graphics can make a web site
really cool and interesting, but that's not what the web is about. It
is about access to information - pure and simple, first and foremost.

--
Rob
Jul 24 '05 #12
John Morgan wrote:
Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.

I am inclined to the view that this approach conflicts with what I
have regarded as the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web as
originally designed, namely the use of hypertext/hyperlinks to get
deeper and deeper into a topic or to depart to some other linked site
to pursue another avenue of knowledge on a topic.

My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place. It takes a lot more time to re-create
every page of a supplied document into html with the pages having less
visual impact than with a pdf file. Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents.. Broadband use: slow
dial up is dying and therefore so are slower downloads.

I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,


As a viewer, I don't like PDF onscreen, for several reasons. One is,
right now I need new glasses. I can postpone the purchase because using
Firefox, a Ctrl-press, and a spin of the mouse wheel I can zoom in on
the page. The text on a good web page will "flow" and not overflow to
the sides, which would me scroll sideways.

That's the biggest problem with PDF. Not everybody's eyes are the same,
not everybody's monitor has the same size or the same resolution. There
are a handful of documents that need to be "frozen", but web pages
aren't one of them.
"Chairs are for Sitting. PDF is for Printing."
http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/pdf.html

"PDF Unfit for Human Consumption"
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html

How to use PDF if you must, more reasons not to:
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030728.html

"For thirty years, one of the most fundamental tenets of human factors
engineering has been that you should not blindly computerize the way
something was done in the past. Existing processes are usually
suboptimal and designed under the old technology's constraints."
--
Steven

HOUSTON - First in Oil, First in Space,
Last in the National League Central Division
Jul 24 '05 #13
In article <si***************************@news.stanford.edu >,
AES <si*****@stanford.edu> wrote:
PDF format is just so useful for storing files on your HD -- so easy to
read PDF files on screen from your HD
Properly authored HTML files adapt much better for screen usage.
(And of course Reader is as universal as it is free.)
It is not. On platforms other than Windows and Mac OS 9, there are PDF
readers that fit the platform better than Adobe Reader (Preview.app on
OS X, gpdf on Gnome and kpdf on KDE). Users of these apps will be very
annoyed if you provide PDFs that only work with the latest Adobe Reader.
So, nearly all the electronically stored stuff on my HD is created or
acquired and saved in PDF. In fact, when I encounter an HTML site on
the web that I want to capture for future offline reading or reference,
I don't download the HTML and read it offline using a browser; I use
Acrobat's Web Capture to download and capture it as a PDF document.


Your choice, but not everyone likes that approach, because it lose
desirable features of HTML.

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html
Jul 24 '05 #14
On Wed, 25 May 2005, Rick Cook wrote:
AES wrote:
2) Making it really easy to autoconvert PDF documents straight
into HTML pages for putting stuff on a web site. (Acrobat can
apparently do something like this -- but Acrobat's online Help is
not at all helpful in saying how.)


Now why do you suppose that is? (Hint: It's not an accident and
Adobe is not being deliberately obtuse.)


Indeed. PDF is defined as an output format - an end product - not as
a content markup language. Trying to convert PDF into HTML is like
trying to convert a good cheese into fresh cream - both are fine milk
products, for their respective purposes, but you'd be better advised
to start from fresh milk than to attempt the conversion.
Jul 24 '05 #15
On Tue, 24 May 2005 20:11:28 GMT, John Morgan
<jf*@XXwoodlander.co.uk> wrote:
My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place.


You need a new designer, or a new friend.

Sorry to be harsh, but your instincts are right and this person
simply does not understand what the Web is about.

--
Stan Brown, Oak Road Systems, Tompkins County, New York, USA
http://OakRoadSystems.com/
"I feel a wave of morning sickness coming on, and I want to
be standing on your mother's grave when it hits."
Jul 24 '05 #16
John Morgan wrote:
Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.

I am inclined to the view that this approach conflicts with what I
have regarded as the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web as
originally designed, namely the use of hypertext/hyperlinks to get
deeper and deeper into a topic or to depart to some other linked site
to pursue another avenue of knowledge on a topic.
PDF is Portable Document Format. It is a method of transmitting
*documents*. If you already *have* a print document that your users
would like to see or that it would be convenient for them to print out
and keep in its original form, PDF is ideal. (For example, I'm always
happy to be able to print out a PDF of a user manual for some gadget
I've bought.) But it's an inferior method of transmitting *information*
through the web for many reasons. And if your designer's idea is that
each *page* will be a separate PDF, then he's entirely off his rocker.

My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place.
Suppose that you've had your designer create a four-page magazine
spread for you, and you've decided you now want to take your message to
television. Imagine what you'd think if he said that after the time and
effort spent on setting up the print spread, the most efficient thing to
do would be to create a TV spot with the pages displayed in sequence for
15 seconds each. Different media, different characteristics, different
treatments.
It takes a lot more time to re-create
every page of a supplied document into html with the pages having less
visual impact than with a pdf file. Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents.
Nonsense. Copy and paste works just fine with PDFs--unless you fail to
properly linearize columnar text, but if you do that then people who use
screen readers won't be able to use your site. (Even if with properly
linearized text, PDFs are a pain for the blind.)
Broadband use: slow
dial up is dying and therefore so are slower downloads.
"Dying" is a relative term--there are still millions and millions of
dial-up users. And even with broadband it's still a pain to wait for
Acrobat to load.

I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,

Best wishes, John Morgan

Jul 24 '05 #17
John Morgan wrote:

Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.

I am inclined to the view that this approach conflicts with what I
have regarded as the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web as
originally designed, namely the use of hypertext/hyperlinks to get
deeper and deeper into a topic or to depart to some other linked site
to pursue another avenue of knowledge on a topic.

My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place. It takes a lot more time to re-create
every page of a supplied document into html with the pages having less
visual impact than with a pdf file. Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents.. Broadband use: slow
dial up is dying and therefore so are slower downloads.

I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,

Best wishes, John Morgan


I use PDF in only three instances:

If I expect the user's primary use of the page will be to print it
rather than to view it online and the original content is either a
Word or Excel file, then I generate a PDF file so the user can
replicate the original when printing.

If the original is a hardcopy document, I scan it into a PDF file.

If the original is a PDF file, I use it as is.

However, even in those cases, I sometimes go through the effort of
creating an HTML file from the content in order to make it more
accessible to all users.

--

David E. Ross
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/>

I use Mozilla as my Web browser because I want a browser that
complies with Web standards. See <URL:http://www.mozilla.org/>.
Jul 24 '05 #18
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Harlan Messinger
<hm*******************@comcast.net> writing in news:3fjgg3F85i5mU1
@individual.net:
Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents.


Nonsense. Copy and paste works just fine with PDFs


Actually, with the latest version of Distiller, the author can disable
copying of text, images and other contents. The author can also disable
printing.

--
Adrienne Boswell
http://www.cavalcade-of-coding.info
Please respond to the group so others can share
Jul 24 '05 #19
Adrienne <ar********@sbcglobal.net> writes:
Gazing into my crystal ball I observed Harlan Messinger
<hm*******************@comcast.net> writing in news:3fjgg3F85i5mU1
@individual.net:
Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents.


Nonsense. Copy and paste works just fine with PDFs


Actually, with the latest version of Distiller, the author can disable
copying of text, images and other contents. The author can also disable
printing.


Does that disabling also work in xpdf or gv, I wonder? You don't
happen to have a sample file that's been treated this way, do you?

Of course, even if it does do that in xpdf too, there's still always
the Print Screen key, followed by a run through an OCR program if
necessary - I'm just curious.

--
Chris
Jul 24 '05 #20
On Wed, 25 May 2005, Chris Morris wrote:
Does that disabling also work in xpdf
http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/cracking.html
gv
I think that depends on the underlying ghostview which gv uses.

Its changelog refers to "crypting support" but doesn't seem to say
explicitly whether it honours these requests from the author. Sorry,
I don't have a sample of such a PDF to hand to try it out.
Of course, even if it does do that in xpdf too, there's still always
the Print Screen key, followed by a run through an OCR program if
necessary - I'm just curious.


Oh sure.
Jul 24 '05 #21
David Ross wrote:

John Morgan wrote:

Though I have designed and implemented a number of large reasonably
well received web sites I do not consider myself a graphics designer

I am now for the first time going to work with a graphics designer. I
notice that in the draft design the idea will be that many 'pages'
will in fact be pdf files. I suppose I exaggerate slightly but the
site could turn out to be a series of 'contents'pages comprising links
to pdf files which are for downloading and reading with Acrobat
Reader.

I am inclined to the view that this approach conflicts with what I
have regarded as the fundamental idea of the World Wide Web as
originally designed, namely the use of hypertext/hyperlinks to get
deeper and deeper into a topic or to depart to some other linked site
to pursue another avenue of knowledge on a topic.

My designer friend says that it is good by using pdf to keep a
document's original design after time and effort has been spent on
designing it in the first place. It takes a lot more time to re-create
every page of a supplied document into html with the pages having less
visual impact than with a pdf file. Security of content - a lot less
people will be able to steal text from documents.. Broadband use: slow
dial up is dying and therefore so are slower downloads.

I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach to
web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this matter,

Best wishes, John Morgan


I use PDF in only three instances:

If I expect the user's primary use of the page will be to print it
rather than to view it online and the original content is either a
Word or Excel file, then I generate a PDF file so the user can
replicate the original when printing.

If the original is a hardcopy document, I scan it into a PDF file.

If the original is a PDF file, I use it as is.

However, even in those cases, I sometimes go through the effort of
creating an HTML file from the content in order to make it more
accessible to all users.


A few other considerations --

An HTML file is significantly smaller than a PDF file with the same
content. Even if you don't care about dial-up users, you should
care about your Web host. Often, you will have to pay an extra
monthly fee if your site exceeds some number of megabytes. Keeping
your site small (HTML instead of PDF) will save you money.

Unlike PDF, an HTML page can be adjusted by the user. That is,
fonts, font sizes, font and background colors, etc. Sometimes this
is merely a user preference (you do want to keep those who visit
your site happy, don't you). Sometimes this is necessary for those
who have visual handicaps or those (such as I) whose eyes are
merely aging.

HTML can be viewed with most window sizes, even as the user changes
the sizes. A well-designed HTML page can also be viewed on
Web-capabile cell phones. This is a serious problem for PDF.

PDF provides no real protection against copying. I can capture a
screen-print of a protected or locked PDF file into a BMP file,
which I can then process with a optical recognition application
into a Word file.

--

David E. Ross
<URL:http://www.rossde.com/>

I use Mozilla as my Web browser because I want a browser that
complies with Web standards. See <URL:http://www.mozilla.org/>.
Jul 24 '05 #22
I am really grateful to those who have taken the time to make some
thoughtful and helpful contributions on this topic.

It has certainly helped clarify my views and I will return to the
discussions much better armed than before.

One remaining thought is what might be the result of putting a similar
question on a pdf forum.............

Bets wishes to all, John Morgan
Jul 24 '05 #23
John Morgan <jf*@XXwoodlander.co.uk> wrote in
news:66********************************@4ax.com:
I would be interested to hear any views on the pdf v. html approach
to web site design which might help clarify my thoughts on this
matter,

Best wishes, John Morgan


My thoughts on this is that pdf is not designed for the www. It is a
great format to allow people to download and print a document; it is
not a good format for reading on screen. I also believe that it may
not (haven't really looked into it) be accessible.

I have a high speed connection as you may have as well. That does not
mean that it is the most common. I have many friends that still use
dialup and I'm sure there are many still with those slow connections.
I try to create pages that load quickly for those that don't have high
speed access.

Although, I do have pdf files on some of the sites I manage, it is not
by my choice but other's choices or in some instances, the only format
that I could get. And I'm not going to go out and pay a bunch of
money for an editor that I don't want to use just to get the text out
of these documents to mark it up correctly.

Most of my arguments against pdf files are "personal taste" so I will
be watching this thread for good, valid arguments that I can use to
stop some of the pdf files from being linked in as if they were just
another page on the site. I have no objection to a pdf being linked
in with information stating that this is a pdf for download and
printing purposes.

I have the same problem with Word and Excel files being placed on the
University site. I keep trying to tell people that it doesn't work
everywhere; not everyone has Word and/or Excel. Again, I have no
objection to them being linked in telling the user that it is a Word
or Excel file that can be downloaded and edited if you have that
application.

--
Stan McCann "Uncle Pirate" http://stanmccann.us/pirate.html
Webmaster/Computer Center Manager, NMSU at Alamogordo
There are 10 kinds of people.
Those that understand binary and those that don't.

Jul 24 '05 #24
AES
In article <Xn************************@216.234.192.142>,
Stan McCann <me@stanmccann.us> wrote:
My thoughts on this is that pdf is not designed for the www. It is a
great format to allow people to download and print a document; it is
not a good format for reading on screen. I also believe that it may
not (haven't really looked into it) be accessible.


There's been a recent thread on a similar subject in comp.text.pdf and
comp.sys.mac.apps under the title of

Adding "Next Page" links to PDF document?

and elsewhere before that.

Without repeating all the arguments there, I believe PDF is the best
general multi-purpose document storage and transmission format for
"ordinary computer users" that is currently available or likely to be
available in the foreseeable future, for reasons I can articulate but
won't at this point -- including for making documents available from
authors to readers on the web "to download and print", as you say.

The technical capability that is still lacking, however, is making it
possible (or at least easy) for readers to look at and step through a
long multi-page PDF document on the web page by page, rather than having
to download the entire document and, in most cases, having to wait for
either a browser PDF plugin or a separate PDF reader to start up.

One good way to solve this would be software to batch-convert the
individual pages in a multipage PDF document into multiple, linked
individual HTML web pages with "Next" and "Previous" buttons overlaid on
the web pages, which the author could post on the web site along with
the PDF version.

This is an essentially trivial problem and can be done quite easily,
now, in fact. All of the tools to do this that I know about or have
available, however, require it be done "by hand", page by page.

So my current situation is I'm looking for an inexpensive Mac tool to do
this efficiently and easily, or hoping that Acrobat will add this
capability sooner or later.
Jul 24 '05 #25
In article <si***************************@news.stanford.edu >,
AES <si*****@stanford.edu> wrote:
The technical capability that is still lacking, however, is making it
possible (or at least easy) for readers to look at and step through a
long multi-page PDF document on the web page by page, rather than having
to download the entire document and,


Eh? That capability has been available in Adobe's implementation since
Acrobat 3, but it requires that
1) The PDF is produced using Adobe's tools. (IIRC, they
are not licensing the related patent to third parties
on an RF basis.)
2) The viewer is Adobe's browser plug-in.
3) The server supports HTTP 1.1 byte ranges (eg. Apache).

Usually either 1 or 2 is not true.

--
Henri Sivonen
hs******@iki.fi
http://hsivonen.iki.fi/
Mozilla Web Author FAQ: http://mozilla.org/docs/web-developer/faq.html
Jul 24 '05 #26

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