Why pdf?

Does it seem as though too many websites are overusing the pdf format?

Much of the time what comes up (slowly and awkwardly) as pdf is not worth the effort to read.  Most of the time you just have to wonder why the material was deemed pdf worthy in the first place. 

Concordia Seminary just re-did their website.  The feeling was everyone who was submitting items for the site felt the need to pdf them.  That has been put to rest now, thankfully.

I was looking at the LCMS convention Today's Business link this morning and of course it's in pdf. 

PDF is a memory hog, slow to load and all around irritating to navigate.  It often looks horrible on the screen.  It could be argued that some material should land in pdf form, material that needs to be protected, but not every blasted thing.

Comments

[Dan at Necessary Roughness]

PDF is good if you have technical papers that have a lot of equations or special fonts that aren't normally on people's machines. It also only requires a free reader to read it on nearly any machine, as opposed to requiring Microsoft Word.

That said, I totally agree with you about how some programs read PDF. Some browsers download the whole file before reading any of it. If the user has special fonts on his machine and doesn't save them, it can look like crap.

I would use PDF in a situation which required sending an email with a PDF attachment. But that is SO 15 years ago. I'd rather write a web page now and let any machine interpret what I write however it wants, as cleanly as it can. :)

[Larry]

Crab!

[HTTPS SSL]

Interesting! The Council for Advancement and Support of Education is a widely recognized and respected entity that provides development information to both public and private educational institutions.