HTML or PDF? Why Are We Asking This Question?

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HTML or PDF? Why Are We Asking This Question?

3/4/2004

By Terry Calhoun

Speaking of his desire to publish more documents on his university's Web site in HTML instead of PDF, a university Web master who shall remain anonymous recently posted the following on the UWEBD discussion list: "There are a lot of things I'd love to do with the school's Web site if it weren't for my job getting in the way." There is a lot of wisdom in that sarcastic statement.

Whether to publish documents online in PDF or in HTML is now a great conversation starter at parties with lots of geeks present. Passion fills the air, and tempers flare. But I think it's only a temporary issue, dependent on our current stage of Web evolution; a question that will be going away in the next decade. Formerly an HTML fanatic, at the moment, I am a big fan of publishing in PDF. I guess if I were running for president, the current administration would be able to accuse me of waffling.

When my employer-organization's journal, Planning for Higher Education, moved to publishing online as well as in print, I was a tyrant about ensuring that we publish it in HTML, not in PDF format. Why? Well, primarily because at the time - late 2000, at the very end of the last millennium - it seemed as though there were many users who found it difficult to keep a fairly current version of Acrobat Reader on their computer. It was commonplace for us to send out a PDF file to a committee or other group of volunteer leaders and hear back from one or two that they couldn't open the document, could we please fax it to them.

At the same time, in well-funded organizations like the giant pharmaceutical company that my spouse works for, every machine could be, and was, made to have Acrobat Reader, and she was churning out a regular, weekly internal newsletter in PDF - which was even formatted to a height and width per page that suited viewing on screen. (I thought that was pretty clever, and I speculated at the time that print publications would modify their height and width to match monitor specs, but it seems not to have caught on as some clever things never do - although much of what we see in print nowadays has remarkably converged with Web documents' look and feel. I also remember when Ford Motor Company eventually gave up trying to drop the second "e" in the word "employee" in all of its communications. Apparently, it figured that over a year and in millions, maybe billions of printed or typed pages, it could be saving some money, somewhere.

But we published our journal in HTML, which led to some fairly awkward contortions. For example, I wanted to reduce the likelihood of people printing out a complete article instead of ordering a reprint (or subscribing) and I wanted to increase the likelihood of citations from the Web matching those in print, so we publish on each HTML page only the same text as was published on each printed page, with appropriate pagination. Somehow, this looks fairly strange in a browser where it d'esn't on the printed page. (See this page, for example.)

But, at the time, we thought it was worth it. In fact, I was passionate about it. How I feel about it right now, in early 2004, reminds me of the final lines of Meatloaf's classic tune "Passion by the Dashboard Light." I'm sitting here kind of "waiting for the end of time, to hurry up and come along" so we can make our decision to start publishing PDF instead of HTML!