Re:Measuring "efficiency" in document prepration: Microsoft ...
by adrian_b on Tuesday December 08, 2020 @05:18PM
(#25352189)
I have seen here similar opinions about HTML vs. PDF in a few other threads.
However, this is a matter of personal opinion and I am certain that nobody knows how many people prefer PDF and how many prefer HTML.
I strongly prefer PDF for any non-ephemeral content that I might need to read twice or more times, so I hate anyone who forces me to read an HTML user manual or scientific paper, instead of providing PDF documents for them.
Even if HTML can be opened on every device, it also looks different on every device and it looks bad on those that are different from the one used by the developer (unless the HTML pages have been carefully designed to look good on various devices, which seldom happens).
Even on a small smartphone screen, I prefer a good PDF viewer with a good user interface that makes it easy to zoom & pan, instead of the feeble attempts of the Web browsers to reformat the text, which make very difficult the navigation through complex technical documents.
"Print" support is horrible for HTML. Modern Web pages, which use a lot of JS, are almost always mutilated when you use the "Print" command in both Chrome and Firefox, even if they display the pages correctly outside the "Print" mode.
However, this is a matter of personal opinion and I am certain that nobody knows how many people prefer PDF and how many prefer HTML.
I strongly prefer PDF for any non-ephemeral content that I might need to read twice or more times, so I hate anyone who forces me to read an HTML user manual or scientific paper, instead of providing PDF documents for them.
Even if HTML can be opened on every device, it also looks different on every device and it looks bad on those that are different from the one used by the developer (unless the HTML pages have been carefully designed to look good on various devices, which seldom happens).
Even on a small smartphone screen, I prefer a good PDF viewer with a good user interface that makes it easy to zoom & pan, instead of the feeble attempts of the Web browsers to reformat the text, which make very difficult the navigation through complex technical documents.
"Print" support is horrible for HTML. Modern Web pages, which use a lot of JS, are almost always mutilated when you use the "Print" command in both Chrome and Firefox, even if they display the pages correctly outside the "Print" mode.