PDF standards (was: Nielsen's Rating)

Subject: PDF standards (was: Nielsen's Rating)
From: "Hart, Geoff" <Geoff-H -at- MTL -dot- FERIC -dot- CA>
To: "TECHWR-L" <techwr-l -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com>
Date: Mon, 25 Jun 2001 08:45:33 -0400

Geoff Lane (a fellow member of the international brotherhood of non-Jeffs
<g>) wonders:

<<Most printed pages are in portrait. Is it a design flaw to follow this
convention? Are all properly designed PDFs in landscape?>>

You missed the original context, which is that this choice is indeed a
design flaw if you're preparing a document for onscreen viewing and half the
document extends off the screen. This forces the reader to do one of two
annoying things: hit the PageDown key just so they can see the text that
lies invisible below the end of the screen, not to move to the next page, or
resize the document so that it all fits on the screen, but illegibly. So no,
not all properly designed PDFs are landscape, and not even all onscreen PDFs
are landscape*. If you have an audience that exclusively uses 17-inch or
larger monitors, you can compromise between onscreen and in-print quite
nicely by formatting the document to fit well on an 8.5X11 piece of paper
running landscape. The document fits nicely on the wide screen, yet still
prints acceptably on regular paper. (N.B. I've cited the American page size
because it's shorter; European metric paper is slightly longer, and thus
might not fit as well on the screen in landscape mode.)

* A PDF designed to emulate a paperback book, for example, fits acceptably
well on even a 15" monitor in portait mode.

<<[in a browser] The end user has (or should have) control over how page
elements appear.>>

Emphatically yes. The biggest failing of Acrobat is that--so far as I
know--it doesn't provide any means of overruling the designer's design to
suit the reader's preferences. For example, wouldn't it be nice if the
designer could pick Garamond 12, and the user could ask for Garamond 18
instead (to ease one's aching eyes) and have the pages reformat on the fly?
That would seem to be the only advantage most e-book software has over
Acrobat, and if Adobe wants to dominate that market too, they should rethink
this feature. So when you choose Acrobat for distributing documents, you've
made a conscious choice: that the integrity of your design should override
the reader's preferences. That may be a good choice--or may not be,
depending on your audience and the goal of the communication.

<<So, you advocate providing two PDFs, one for printing and one for online
use! Surely this implies that each PDF be used for printing or for online
use, but not both. If you need to provide two PDFs, why not replace the
online version with something more suited to online work? After all, if the
reader wants to print the document, they can use the (superior for printing)
PDF form; if they want to view on line, they can use the (superior for
online viewing) HTML, WinHelp, et al.>>

That's exactly the dilemma, isn't it? Trying to create a "one size fits all"
solution usually means that it fits nobody perfectly, and fits most people
uncomfortably. Conversely, if you're going to produce two separate solutions
(one online and the other in print), shouldn't you choose the best solution
for each medium? As always, the solution is to identify your audience's
needs and pick a solution that meets those needs; the goal isn't to pick
your solution and rationalize how it might meet some of their needs--which
you're not advocating, and I wish more people recognized the problem you're
pointing out.

--Geoff Hart, FERIC, Pointe-Claire, Quebec
geoff-h -at- mtl -dot- feric -dot- ca
"User's advocate" online monthly at
www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/usersadvocate.html

"The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree, is
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accidents."-- Nathaniel Borenstein

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