Problems with PDF files

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

Hello. If you dont like using Adobe Acrobat Reader try Foxit Reader. Its great and takes no time at all to open PDF files.
On the topic of PDFs I have a mixed view about them. They are good for documents such as user guides, CVs etc but if you want to convert a pdf to word (eg if you had an application form you wanted to complete electronically) then you need to download a converter, which I have yet to find a decent one. Also try Macromedia FlashPaper which enables you to convert Word documents to PDF. Good luck

PDF's may be great if you are typesetting or printing off large volumes of something, but for ordinary web pages the format is completely innapropriate.

PDF files are a treasure. Geeks argue the same information could be presented in XML and be automatically opened and formatted by their toasters. PDF's are the defacto standard for professional printing presses now because they hold all the design information, fonts, layout, pictures in a single file that can be sent over the wire. PDF's can't crash!

I can't stand receiving PDF files in an email or downloading them from a site. A complete nightmare. Loved DOS in the bad old days.. but you can keep your PDF's

I love DOS. As an operating system, it was absolutely brilliant. Windows was, is and probably always will be a nightmare, although I do admit that XP is actually not too bad I suppose.

The reason I am such a fan of PDF is because I used to typeset books for publishers, and I could just email the proofs through as PDF's and the publisher would know that these were WYSIWYG and could rely on the proofs to be 100% accurate. I don't recall ever having a problem.

Now I am back in the big wide world of employment working as a secretary, I still regularly use .PDF's to send letters etc. to Clients attached to an email, and still have no problem.

Ah the good old days of mainframes - whole rooms dedicated to one computer, which would crash if someone opened the door at the wrong time causing the temperature to fluctuate by an nth of a degree! What fun those days were! (not!)