Cameron Barrett pointed to a brief article by Jakob Nielsen about the uses and abuses of PDF files. I like the PDF format and applications a lot, but it is often misused on the web. Barrett notes that a person he worked with insisted on storing meeting notes in PDF rather than ASCII. Dumb.
There’s one thing Nielsen didn’t mention that I run into all the time — sites that insist on taking say a 200 page report, and breaking that up into 15 or 20 different PDF files. Usually each PDF file corresponds to a single chapter. Unfortunately, most such sites don’t bother to include a PDF version of the entire report.
The United Nations is especially bad at this. Check out the web page for the recently released The State Of The World’s Cities Report 2001. If you want to download and print the entire report you’re looking at 50+ separate PDF files which don’t even use a sensible numbering scheme (guess how these files will look in your directory with 10-11.pdf, 15.pdf, 104.pdf, etc. Couldn’t somebody have taken a second to put leading zeros at the front of the two digit chapter file names?)
I know why they did it like this — because this is going to be a huge file to download all at once, but then it is going to be a huge file transfer job to download all of the smaller files as well. Why not just throw a PDF file with the entire report up there?
There’s one more thing I would have added to Nielsen’s recommendations. Every file that is in PDF form should be available on your web site in HTML form unless it is something that is print-specific such as a specially formatted form.
I like how the Heritage Foundation does this on their site. Every article is available in HTML form with a link to the PDF version. This is much better than what the Cato Institute started doing a couple years ago. Now most of their reports included only a short HTML summary and a link to a PDF version of the entire report. Why not put the HTML version of the report up for those of us who just want to scan it, and link to the PDF version for people who want to download and print it out?
Personally, when Cato did this I simply stopped reading their reports.