Opinion: Improper editing and posting—not inherent flaws in the format—are to blame for the plague of disconnected online PDFs.The free Adobe Reader is everywhere! PDFs are easy to make! Everyone's doing it! Because of that, PDFs are getting a bad rep in certain tech circles.
The argument goes something like this: Writing in to a Ziff Davis Media sister site, Microsoft Watch, a reader proclaimed PDFs a "plague on the Internet."
His main beef? Documents in which there's no structure or links, so when a PDF represents one part of a set of documents—it's a chapter in a book, a part of a technical manual, one of 10 brochures—it often has no context or trail of breadcrumbs for the reader to follow. People who find the document via Google and download it get only a slice when they need the whole pie.
"I can't get to any associated information on the server hosting the PDF!" this reader said. "PDF is … destroying the fundamental linkage mechanism that made the Internet so powerful."
That's a pretty heavy accusation to level at a little old document file format, but "unfortunately, he is right," said Carl Young, Acrobat trainer, book author and organizer of the PDF Conference.
"Government agencies and corporations wouldn't think of distributing a paper report a section at a time, yet they routinely place PDFs on the Web that lack links—either to the rest of the document or to related files," Young said. "The files often lack links from tables of contents and bookmarks."
The reason for this, he said, is that when it comes to making PDFs, it's the Wild West. There are no rules. Most of us can do it, but few of us can do it well.
"There are standards for paper documents, and standards for Web sites," Young said, "but there are not any standards for PDFs."
It's obvious from these arguments that the PDF format isn't the problem. The bad rep is undeserved—unless we also get to blame HTML for every poorly done Web site with blinking text and poor navigation, and Microsoft Word for every "Chicken Soup" book at Barnes & Noble.
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Gun lobbyists—from whom I'm loath to borrow because my politics are quite their opposite—have a catchy saying that has a perfect parallel in this situation. They like to say, "Guns don't kill people, people kill people." And I would add: "PDF isn't clogging up the Internet, it's the dolts making long, unstructured PDFs."
Before people upload PDFs to the Web—especially those containing educational materials or federal policies and regulations whose readers have to read and understand them—they should be forced to take an exam similar to a driver's test.
What should they need to know? If I were in charge, along with Young and perhaps the most famous PDF critiquer, Shlomo Perets of Microtype Israel, we'd require, at a minimum, knowledge of the following:
Bookmarks and tables of contents. They're easy to build. References such as Young's book—or the Acrobat help docs, for that matter—spell out exactly how to do it. When uploading a multipart document in manageable "chunks" so readers don't have to download the whole thing at once just to get a certain page, make a link to the table of contents obvious and accessible in every chunk.
Links. Hyperlinks. That's right. If you can do it in a Word document or a blog entry, you can do it in a PDF. If you leave your PDF documents downloadable from a site for more than a few months, you should be required to review—and fix—busted links on a periodic basis. Thankfully, several companies produce automatic link-checker software to make this process less painful.
Statement of purpose. Is this document meant to be printed? Used on-screen only? If it's one, is there a parallel version meant for the other mode available for download? Label the documents on the download page, and then again in the document. Link back to the page of origin so that when people Google the wrong version, they can find the right one, fast.
Fast Web view. When you make an in-demand PDF, don't make people download the whole thing before they can start reading it.
Optimization. It's a big word for some people, I know, but it's the difference between making your PDF a gas-guzzling SUV or a bandwidth-saving Prius. Acrobat does this. If you don't have Acrobat, there are several third-party software tools that will do this for you.
In my world, anyone who didn't follow these rules of the road would be subject to a fine, license suspension, and/or using a 28K dial-up connection for up to five years without a glimmer of hope for parole or probation. In Perets' world, PDF creators would be given a checklist for each kind of PDF they might make (screen optimized or for printing) and check their files twice before uploading them to the Web.
In the real world, however, we can only offer the same "PDF 101" tips lists, ad nauseam, and hope the legions of new people daily entering the world of PDF will take heed.
There are many more things people can do to make their PDFs more user-friendly. It's easy to Google information on how to do it, and Adobe's guidance on accessibility shows up high on the list because it offers a great start.
If you've been so blithe or inconsiderate as to upload a long document without structure, it's not too late to mend your ways—and please do, because if you're not part of the solution, you're contributing to the growing perception that PDF is the Internet's content garbage barge. And it isn't.
Don Fluckinger is a freelance writer based in Nashua, N.H., who has covered Acrobat and PDF technologies for PDFzone since 2000.
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