gDoc

Ian Douglas at the Telegraph has written a blog post complaining about PDFs because they often don’t work well when read on computer monitors and especially not on mobile devices like an iPhone. I’m generally a PDF advocate, but I have to say he’s right … sort of.

First, look at the life-cycle of a document; it needs to be managed in an authoring format at early stages. Allowing free and complete editing needs a “flow format”; something like a Word file or ODF that allows text to run over line ends when you insert or delete a word. Later in the cycle most documents benefit from translation to a distribution format, which is less susceptible to accidental change and (more or less) guaranteed to accurately reflect the author’s intentions.

But the proliferation of publishing opportunities today (in print, on the web, on mobile devices etc), combined with different requirements for fidelity can make selection of an appropriate distribution format difficult. In some cases all that matters is that the words are in the right order with some identification of headings and emphasis. In others the precise design matters. In between those extremes the layout can be a vital adjunct to a stream of words by enabling references to a specific clause, as would be the case for legal texts.

If the page design is important then PDF (amongst a few others) is an extremely good distribution format. But the need to respect that formatting can then cause annoyance if the formatting is inappropriate for the way that you view the file.

Most computer users have landscape format screens; most documents are written on portrait format pages; both are for historical reasons. Reading a portrait page on a landscape monitor can be a very frustrating experience, especially if it uses multiple columns. I’m lucky enough to have a rotatable monitor that lives almost permanently in its portrait position and I would be loath to lose it. Large tables that can’t be fitted into view at a sensible scale are also difficult to read.

Document designers and publishers could alleviate matters hugely by designing pages appropriately. If most of your readers will be using a computer screen rather than printing out your documents could you design on a landscape page? Can you sensibly split up your big tables, or re-format them so that each segment as you move through them makes sense on its own? What really is your goal in distributing the document; is it to provide just the words, or does the design matter as well?

Of course, if you use gDoc Fusion to read files it doesn’t matter whether somebody sends you a Word doc or a PDF … but the way the pages were designed will still play a role in how easy it is to read!