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Jacob Nielsen's polemic on PDF as an on-line medium reveals his lack of
even a basic understanding of PDF's capabilities and advantages. His claim
that PDF produces a 300% reduction in readability is not only absurd, its
outrageous. Moreover, strictly speaking, there is no such thing as a 300%
reduction in anything. Nevertheless, after making that assertion, he twirls
180 degrees (I suppose Nielsen would say 180%) and suggests that PDF is
probably the best solution for anything over five pages! Common sense
informs me that the longer a document is, the more important readability
becomes, thus he appears to be admitting that PDF has superior readability.
Next, Nielsen admits that PDF is probably the best solution if the material
must be printed. But the typical web surfer, in information search mode,
uses a search engine to identify candidate web sites, scans the listed
sites for potential nuggets, prints the nuggets, logs off, examines the
printed material more carefully, culls out what is redundant or useless,
and preserves the rest. But if the found nuggets are in HTML, we encounter
the following problems in printing out the information:
1. About 90% of the time we can't just print selected pages from a a long
HTML document, thus it's all or nothing. That kills trees and time.
2. All too frequently, words at the right edge of the page, and entire text
lines at the bottom or top of a page, get dropped.
3. Graphics often get clipped, or cross printed page boundaries, making
them useless.
A PDF document yields an exact replica of the original document (produced
with a high-end DTP), including running headers and footers, page layout,
and typography (all the fonts used in the document are embedded in the PDF,
thus it is platform-independent). When a PDF document is viewed on-line,
you can zoom-in on any selected portion of a page. Portrait and landscaped
pages can be intermixed in the same document and printed successfully.
As far as I'm concerned, HTML is a return to the dark ages of publishing,
before it was recognized that typography and page design were the essential
tools for improving readability and comprehension.
The Web has become the haven for the growing legions of the non-literate.
These are people who can read, but choose not to. They never sit down and
thoroughly read a book or a newspaper. They get their news from television.
When they do read, they just skim, claiming they can get the gist of any
subject that way, and that's enough to get by, even in college. If a
company is catering to this lowest-common-denominator of reader, it makes
sense to hire web designers who also belong to that same Ritalin-deprived
caste.
Furthermore, the prime interest of most subscribers to TechWhirlers is not
web page design. Instead, they're concerned with the development of
procedure-dominant documentation that can be successfully viewed on-line
and which can also be printed successfully when (as is often the case)
there is a need to do so. Designing such documentation for that
lowest-common-denominator non-literate reader guarantees that it will fail
to fulfill the needs of both literate and non-literate users.
====================
| Nullius in Verba |
====================
Dan Emory, Dan Emory & Associates
FrameMaker/FrameMaker+SGML Document Design & Database Publishing
Voice/Fax: 949-722-8971 E-Mail: danemory -at- primenet -dot- com
177 Riverside Ave., STE F, #1151, Newport Beach, CA 92663
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