Why use PDF for online information? (was: Nielsen's Rating of PDF )

["Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>]

Darren Barefoot wondered: <<can you suggest a scenario where it would
preferable to produce a PDF formatted for online viewing as opposed to using
HTML?>>

PDF is primarily useful where being able to control the visual aspects of
the presentation are important. With documents formatted in HTML, for
example, the reader can control the shape of the Window (thus, can
potentially distort the spatial relationships between elements), can alter
the font characteristics (typeface, type size, font used, color), and can
copy text. PDF lets you control spatial relationships more easily and
precisely than if you use HTML tables and frames, lets you control font
characteristics, and lets you protect a document more easily (though a
skilled computer user can still find ways around that protection). With
appropriate tools, Acrobat also lets you easily annotate documents onscreen,
something that's difficult to do with HTML pages (though there are
"graffiti" services on the Web that let you store annotations to other
people's pages on the service's server that appear as overlays when you load
that page via their server). Acrobat also lets you download a single file
per "publication", rather than the potentially dozens of files _per page_
that may be required for a complex HTML page, thereby making file management
simpler. Moreover, Acrobat lets you control color more precisely,
particularly if you need to print pages; browsers are limited to the ca. 230
colors used for the Web. Finally, the presentation is independent of the
browser being used, provided the reader can download the PDF to their hard
disk (rather than reading it in their browser) and can install (or has
already installed) a recent version of Acrobat Reader; even the 'recent
version' part is negotiable if you don't use all the latest and greatest
features of Acrobat, since Acrobat Reader is backwards compatible.

Where would this be important?
- Controlling typography: Where the esthetics of the design are as important
as the functionality, strong control of typography is important. I'm
thinking art books, poetry, reprints of Shakespeare's plays online (to give
an "antique" feel to the play--how would you _easily_ create "drop caps" in
HTML?), and so on. As well, for the sake of legibility, it's much easier to
control kerning, leading, and other typographic features in Acrobat than it
is on the Web. The tradeoff is that readers lose the ability to pick their
favorite fonts, and if they have reading problems with the fonts you've
chosen, you've compromised the communication.
- Spatial relationships: As any information designer will tell you, being
able to control the balance between white ("negative") space and content
("positive") space is important for some designs, and juxtapositions of text
and graphics can be important. For most of what we do, you can use HTML
tables to create good use of white space, and you can create juxtapositions
by integrating the text and visuals in a single graphic file, but neither
approach is as easy as doing the job in Frame etc.
- Document protection: Acrobat lets you use strong passwords to protect
access to the file, plus lets you individually enable and disable various
features such as printing, copying, etc.
- Annotation: With "Acrobat Business Tools" (less expensive) or the full
version of Acrobat (more expensive), you can use a PDF file as the
equivalent of a whiteboard, where everyone gets to scrawl comments on the
page. This is important in tasks such as designing ads.
- One file: One thing I hate about downloading Web pages or portions of
sites is the mess it makes on my hard drive. A single PDF is much more
attractive, particularly for large projects.
- Color control: You can't control the characteristics of someone's monitor,
but you can produce much better color depth in Acrobat than you can on the
Web. Where color is really important (e.g., in a publication I did on
maturation of jack pine cones), that's crucial. And as color management
software becomes increasingly integrated in operating systems, this will
account for color shifts between monitors. Currently, color control may be
more important for things like brand logos.

<<The best I can think of is if you were distributing PDF forms over a
network, and needed people to complete them online. But even then, I don't
know why you wouldn't use HTML with a back-end of your choice.>>

We've discussed this a few times (check the archives); apparently, legal
requirements in some industries require that the forms be protected in such
a way that users can't alter the content or appearance.

<<Another option, I suppose, would be a document which you thought was
mostly going to be read online, but was maybe going to be printed?>>

That's another option, and you can do some really interesting multimedia
things with Acrobat. Nothing that you can't do with HTML, or do better with
something like Authorware, but it's not always necessary to choose the best
tool for the job. What's more interesting to me--and I confess I haven't
thought it through in any detail--is the notion that for some of our
audience, and for some tasks, a book metaphor to the user interface may be
more useful than a hypertext metaphor. Why? Simply because thousands of
years of evolution went into shaping book designs, which are now pretty darn
effective for what we use books for, and we have decades of experience
working with books. At some point, we may leave the book model behind, but I
don't think we're there yet.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC
580 boul. St-Jean, Pointe-Claire, Quebec H9R 3J9
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca 

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