Problems with PDF files

Some of this is solved with FillAnyPdf.com - so if someone gives you a PDF that can be filled or saved, you can upload it there and fill it out and save it. Free to use.

As far as I know there are no paedofiles living in our area..........oh, hang on.......I might have got the wrong end of the stick here.

Note to self: PDF files are a totally different thing! ;-) :-) :-)

pdf - can't fill a form in on line- takes an age to download...why have them?

Interesting discussion. I've just produced a pdf A4 landscape guidebook (the equivalent of a full size paperback), which needs to be read on a secure Reader, not Adobe. The pdf content is clear to read; it has hyperlinks that takes readers to and from other parts of the guide, for speed and convenience; it has bookmarks on the side, allowing readers can locate main and sub chapters and tables with speed and ease. The guide can also be sold in parts, not just as a whole, making it cheaper for those who don't want to pay full price for the full size guide.

I consider this to be a much better concept and on-screen experience than website pages. No one who's bought the guide so far has complained about it, but I think some are wary of the concept because it's basically a pdf book.Some are wary of DRM software too. Why is that?

Why are hard copy books so popular? They're slow to arrive (much slower than downloading the Reader, which only takes about 3 minutes) and accessing other parts of the book is not so easy and self published books either look tacky or they're hideously expensive to produce.

From my company's point of view the Reader also allows me to put settings on the guide to prevent the guide being copied to others without payment. Critical for commercial viability for the price I'm charging, which is comparable to a trade publication. This would be impossible in hard-copy for self-published material.

I can only see pluses, not minuses.

Help please?-
Well when I open a pdf file a window pops up and says that I must also open another "suite" component such as Abode photo something...and when I close the window the screen goes blank and I can't read the file. HELLP

The whole thing with different types of file drives me nuts. You get an email with an attachment & when you try to open it you get a message saying "windows cannot open this type of file". It then offers to look on the internet for software to open it and after doing a VERY thorough search for about half a nanosecond announces it can't find anything & suggests some places I might look myself! If I even try to I get dragged into stuff so technical I end up giving up.
I just sit there saying "this is a computer file & you are a computer so open it already!!"
I always used to say I wouldn't have a computer until they could learn to do what I want & not the other way around.

I hate Adobe Acrobat. I hate software which constantly begs to be upgraded. Adobe Acrobat in its latest incarnations is horribly unusable. It is bloatware. Why do companies force us to use Adobe Acrobat forms when applying for jobs?

Why do we have the PDF format? There are so many other formats which are better, compress better, which preserve the meaning of the text rather than its form.

However, people who wish to go back to DOS, probably prefer to travel by penny-farthing. I rather like my horseless carriage personally and will run down these penny-farthing sorts whenever I possibly can.

Get rid of Adobe Acrobat and use little Foxit. It works 10 times faster and no bloat. PDF is OK if you MUST retain formatting, but it is a little bit analy retentive isn't it.

"Yahoo has reached a deal to start running advertisements in Adobe's popular PDF document-reading format. The service will allow publishers to make money by including adverts linked to the content of a PDF document in a panel at the side of the page." - source BBC News http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/low/business/7118363.stm

Oh look. Another reason to avoid PDF files like the proverbial plague!!

Your gripe really seems to be with Acrobat Reader (or whatever other software), and with the way manuals are created. rather than with the PDF format itself.

PDF files are for a specific purpose; they're an open format designed so that anyone, using any computer, can view/print a document with the exact same appearance as when it was created – regardless of what fonts they might have installed, what hardware they use, etc. No one can argue that they do this wonderfully.

The problem only comes when people creating the files don't consider what medium they're going to be read through. It's extremely unlikely that anyone's going to print out an instruction manual of 300-odd-pages, yet equipment manufacturers still seem to believe they should provide everything in the A4 page size, regardless of how unwieldy it is to read on-screen.

As for complaining about slowness, the problem really does lie with Acrobat Reader – no one seems to be able to figure out why this is. There are several other similar pieces of software that appear to be much more rapid. Apple's Preview launches and opens a PDF within about 3 seconds (even on this fairly old machine), and I can certainly remember equally speedy performance when using BeOS or Ubuntu on my Dell box.

Basically, complain all you like about Adobe, or people who publish manuals, but please do not insult the wonderful wonderful PDF format. It does what it's designed for, and does it very well.

I agree with the article totally!

In my opinion the .pdf file is the worst thing unleashed upon (unsuspecting and naiive) man since World War 2.

OK - they might be OK for you folks working with pretty simple word documents etc. etc. - but I'm in Engineering and everybody keeps asking for drawings in .pdf format. Try it!

Just opening one up and reading it takes an age. Printing it is worse than six months in jail, and it won't even be to scale anyway!

As I write I'm creating one .... slowly ... my Pentium 4 is churning away now for more than a damned hour.

.pdf is old fashioned, innefficient ... and a disgrace.

PDF's are the doggies little danglies and I love them. x