Short for Portable Document Format,
pdf is a versatile file format developed by
Adobe Systems and has many diverse uses. Many use it for print/press purposes, but others use it for visually-rich interactive documents, multimedia, forms, image-based catalogs, and other purposes. This is
the point of a pdf - it's
useful only when you
need to print a document that is too long or complicated to read online. It's useless for effective online communication and unpleasant to read or navigate online.
Effective web managers' will
use pdf's correctly by following
techniques based on effective communication, usability and search engine optimisation. If you have to use a
pdf, follow these
tips to make it accessible.
Here are my reasons for typical problems with
pdf's:
Linear and created for print
PDF documents are typically converted from marketing material that was intended for print. It will be written with the intention that the user will read it in some external environment. Therefore, it often contains contextual and background information on the organisation which wastes the users time on the web (they don't need this as they are already on your website!). It will be designed to get the users attention. It will have very large colourful images. It will be a monster file size. Web is not print. People read differently on the web.
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User error
Most of the usability problems are largely due to
users not understanding the techniques of using the
pdf application.
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. Another reason not to force users down a path they are not comfortable with.
Jarring scrolling
As the
pdf documents are
typically large, you need to scroll through the pages. This will often create
jarring as your computer
processes the information especially where the file size is large.
Crashes computers
Users system capabilities have improved greatly in recent years. So whilst 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. Especially as most web managers
don't pay attention to file sizes.
At Aon, I frequently had requests to upload
pdf files that were over 4
MB in size! Needless to say, this always resulted in a polite refusal.
Flow of content
On the
web you are in a hurry. You are time precious. Therefore having to wait for your Acrobat reader to launch so that you can see the content is
very frustrating and annoying. To add to this,
pdf files are often large files that tend to take a long time to download and are then written for print.
Orphaned document
As the
pdf launches into a new application, it's orphaned from your website. You
lose the context of the content, the navigation of your website and all the related content. Users can't even find a simple way to return to your site's original location.
Content dump
Most
pdf files are
immense content chunks with no internal navigation. They also typically
not designed for 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 51 (yes, these documents do exist), there's close to zero probability that you will locate it.
