yowkee essential

PDF Usability

Jakob Nielsen has a rant of PDF usability on his latest AlertBox. These are the very true problems quoted from his article:

• Linear exposition. PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, so the authors wouldn’t have followed the guidelines for Web writing. The result? A long text that takes up many screens and is unpleasant and boring to read.
  
• Jarring user experience. PDF lives in its own environment with different commands and menus. Even simple things like printing or saving documents are difficult because standard browser commands don’t work.
  
• Crashes and software problems. While not as bad as in the past, you’re still more likely to crash users’ browsers or computers if you serve them a PDF file rather than an HTML page.
  
• Breaks flow. You have to wait for the special reader to start before you can see the content. Also, PDF files often take longer time to download because they tend to be stuffed with more fluff than plain Web pages.
  
• Orphaned location. Because the PDF file is not a Web page, it doesn’t show your standard navigation bars. Typically, users can’t even find a simple way to return to your site’s homepage.
  
• Content blob. Most PDF files are immense content chunks with no internal navigation. They also lack a decent search, aside from the extremely primitive ability to jump to a text string’s next literal match. If the user’s question is answered on page 75, there’s close to zero probability that he or she will locate it.
  
• Text fits the printed page, not a computer screen. PDF layouts are often optimized for a sheet of paper, which rarely matches the size of the user’s browser window. Bye-bye smooth scrolling. Hello tiny fonts.
  

I hate to view PDF file in a browser window. It’s slow to launch the reader, the navigate bar is confusing, and it’s crash-prone. Always remember to right click on the PDF link and save it, or configure your browser to save it instead of open it with Acrobat Reader. The other annoying thing is, everytime you open a PDF file, you got to adjust the font size if you gonna view it on screen, because it’s designed for PRINTING.

If PDF files are typically converted from documents that were intended for print, why there’re still a lot of publishers use PDF for ebooks in attached CDROM? Aren’t they encourage printing of the ebooks when readers already hold the dead-tree copy? I would prefer CHM, for the indexing and search (chm format got the font issue too.