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

In a time of increasing demand on our staff time and other resources, I really resent the time it takes to manually move text from Quark into the database which publishes the online version of our journal, and the various manipulations needed to make that work. As that happens, and as my staff spends time it really seems as though it d'esn't need to spend every three months doing this, I think to my self, "We could just print from Quark to PDF and be done with it!" As one member of the UWEBD list put it, "How do you justify the 2-3 hours it'll take you to HTML-ify articles when to the normal person it's a couple of button pushes with Acrobat and you're on your merry way?"

I am certain that if we were making the move today we would just publish non-printable PDFs linked to an HTML index page. PDF has come a long way, accessibility issues aside, as important as they are, you can now provide active form fields and validation in a PDF document, and the newest photocopiers can output to PDF nearly as easily as they do to paper with sprinkles of baked-on carbon dust.

Of course, newer trends like the use of XML and serious content management systems will render all of this moot, as this one of many information technology convergences moves us to a future where end users can select their content and their format. And Bill Gates has recently expounded on how he believes that reading will move from paper to the screen in the next ten years. We'll see if Microsoft can force the kind of cultural shift that Ford could not with that extra "e."

But at the moment, it's not "there" for smaller organizations, including colleges and university departments. And the move to having "there" seems, at this end, to be a long and arduous path with requires lots of money to be spent, and lots of staff time spent analyzing and changing staff procedures. My staff has, for example, the savvy and the knowledge to move to XML and better content management, but we also have strongly competing demands on the time of the staff who would have to drive it. So, for at least the short- to medium-term, I am going to be looking more favorably towards publishing PDF online versions of also-printed-on-paper publications far more favorably than I am going to be looking at HTML.

As another UWEBDer put it, "Bingo. The issue is time and resources. A PDF is only seconds away. If you don't have a CMS, or you're not a full-time Webbie, converting print to HTML is a chore. Who likes to do their chores?" He g'es on to point out that the very pragmatic things for people like me to be considering now include:

- Use PDFs when people expect or want to see the original, printed product;
- Use PDFs if the only other option you can do is no Web version at all;
- Realize that for some, PDFs are slow and cumbersome and can create crashing problems; and
- When you do take the time to do HTML, publicize the heck out of it and take credit for it!

How about you? I'd like to hear your opinions on this and would be happy to share them, in an unbiased and fair kind of way, in a future opinion piece here. Don't hesitate to e-mail me at splendid@umich.edu.

About the author: Terry Calhoun is Director of Communications and Publications for the Society for College and University Planning (SCUP). You can contact him through CT's IT Trends forum by clicking here. View more articles by Terry Calhoun.

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Terry Calhoun, "HTML or PDF? Why Are We Asking This Question?," Campus Technology, 3/4/2004, http://www.campustechnology.com/article.aspx?aid=38368

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