PDFs
Adobe's Acrobat product is responsible for a digital civil war. Authors love Acrobat, readers do not like it. Readers who are using a handheld computer despise the software.
Acrobat tries to produce"digital paper" - in other words, it converts any computer document into a format that appears like paper on a computer screen. The format is known as PDF (Portable Document Format).
UK doctors have seen this in action thanks to the goverment's National Service Frameworks. These are detailed standards of care that clinicians are expected to read and then adhere to. In the early days, the documents were only available in PDF.
Putting your content in this format makes it inaccessible to handheld computer users. First, Palm-compatible cannot even open the document unless it is first converted through their desktop computer.
Second, Pocket PC users can open the document, but it is still useless. Here is what one such document looks like:
Screenshot of a PDF document from www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov on
PIE
Note how the "faithful" recreation of the paper layout means
that the text
is unreadable on such a small screen
The paper experience is there, because the document is laid out exactly as it would be on an A4 piece of paper. Of course a Pocket PC is much smaller than this, so a lot of zooming is necessary to get to readable size text:
Two screenshots of the same document on
PIE
The user has to zoom in twice before the text is legible
However this leads to text that is too large for the width of the screen. The reader must scroll to the right every few words. After a few lines, they will give up.
PDF is useful for printing. Your intranet should only include PDFs if you also include a web version of the content.
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