Hope everyone had a great Easter long weekend.  Mine was especially good as I had the Thursday off too, 5-day weekend!  I decided to ban myself from the internet for the whole weekend and just focus on family time, so I’m catching up to…

a) Jakob Nielsen follows up the PDF article you cite with:
“Gateway Pages Prevent PDF Shock”
http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030728.html

Where even he admits: “Websites use PDF despite its weaknesses because it supports ease of posting, even as it denies ease of use. Basically, content providers save money by not having to convert the information into a Web-suitable format.”

b) One place I think we are using PDFs well is in publishing Bible study guides. We have a number of them, written in MS Publisher or Word by staff or members, then we post a PDF. The PDF provides far better output than printing an html page from a browser would. Since these are intended for printout, it makes sense. And yes, I am using HTML gateway pages for each, with lots of information and any appropriate links.

http://www.centralpc.org/study/study.htm

p.s. sorry if these two posts are on PDF rather than the main topic of your post. I would have commented in your older blog entry on PDF but the commenting there doesn’t work.

… where he’s admitting that “Websites use PDF despite its weaknesses because it supports ease of posting, even as it denies ease of use. Basically, content providers save money by not having to convert the information into a Web-suitable format.”

One place I believe we’re using PDF effectively, and more for its intended use, is in bible study guides. The church staff and some volunteers in the church have published some studies which are done in PDF so the user can print them out. Since it is meant for printout, they can do a much better job with the output than we’d get from print html pages from a browser. And yes, I am providing html gateway pages with lots of info and links for each.
http://www.centralpc.org/study/study.htm

There are times where, either due to lack of good publishing tools, or just the hassle of posting something with all it’s layout, formatting, images, etc, it is reasonable (IMO) to post a PDF.

For instance, most years I’ve posted our church’s annual report as a set of separate html pages, all nicely linked, with set nav, etc.
(example: http://www.centralpc.org/docs/anreports/anrpt05a.htm)

Since we aren’t yet under a CMS, that work is manual editing, so the whole process from copying all the content into template pages, doing the formatting and linking, editing and adding the images, etc; takes a number of hours.

This year I didn’t have that time to spare so I posted one PDF of the whole report. The office staff could create it directly from publisher (or I could), and I could check and add it to the site very quickly.

Yeah, there are better answers in general, including using better html publishing or CMS tools, and it’s nice if every page of your website meets all of JN’s guidelines, and is a work of beauty and grace. But sometimes it’s worth remembering that shortcuts aren’t the end of the world, and sometimes they let you publish something that you wouldn’t have *time* to publish at all otherwise.

I wouldn’t recommend doing main functional pages of a site with PDF, and I wouldn’t do sermons in only PDF, but for single-shot things like newsletters, annual reports, etc, that are really most useful around the particular time of their publication, I can certainly see justification for using PDF as a quick means of publishing.

P.S. Adobe is supposedly submitting the PDF format to one of the standards orgs to become an official spec. Perhaps that’ll mean that we get a better PDF reader from someone else, with better usability. The reader doesn’t *have* to be so bad, it could certainly have better usability itself.