It’s a slow Sunday morning so I was going to browse around a new language I’d been hearing rumors of, and maybe send them a little link love if I liked what I saw. However it seems all their tutorials, manuals, white papers, and almost everything else are in PDF. Yuck. Not worth my time.

They’re complaining that they can’t get any thought leaders to pay attention to them. If they insist on publishing on the Web in a format designed for paper books, it’s no wonder no one has noticed them. Write back when you start noticing this little thing called HTML, guys. I’ve got a feeling it’s going to be big one of these days.



Seriously folks, PDF is wrong for the Web and always has been. Unless you’re distributing fliers to your salespeople that they’re going to take to a print shop and have printed up for their next meeting, there’s really no reason to publish PDF on the Web. Whenever I see a link to a PDF, I know that the author was so enamored of their tool that they didn’t stop to consider the desires or convenience of the reader. They put their needs ahead of their readers.

HTML has been around for almost 20 years now. The time has long since passed for using HTML incapable tools that can only print to PDF. If you’re going to publish on the Web, then you need to publish in HTML; and that means you need to author in HTML or a format that can be easily converted to HTML. PDF is a sure sign that a site is being put up for the ego-gratification of its authors, and has little interest in communicating with anyone else.

For most documents today, the Web is the most important medium. It is more important to have a good web site that people can read than it is to have attractive dead trees. If a publisher/author does not have the time or budget to manually convert printed formats into HTML for the Web, then they should author in HTML first and print that, rather than authoring in Word and posting it as PDF on the Web. HTML is a much better paper format than PDF is a web format. With a little CSS or XSLT trickery, an HTML authored book is indistinguishable from one written in Word.

PDF is nothing more than a prepress format in the same family as raw PostScript, dvi files, XSL-FO, and a dozen other technologies designed for 1980s-era Linotypes. It has a niche, but that niche is not the Web. If you want people to read what you write, then publish in HTML, never PDF.