Re: pdf vs. html

[Scott Wahl <swahl -at- BRIDGEWATERSYS -dot- COM>]

Hi Diane,

A few quick thoughts.

I use both paper and HTML to deliver documentation: HTML to provide online
information with a JAVA-based product, and PDF to deliver electronic copies of
paper documents.

PDF and HTML are both good ways of delivering information, but it depends on
how you structure the information and how you want users to access it.

PDF is good if you have paper documentation that you also want to deliver
electronically, with minimal processing.  It is very straightforward to go from
Word or Frame to PDF.  PDF just takes a snapshot of each page, so it preservs
the look and feel of the paper document, including numbering, headers/footers
and other paper-oriented formatting.   But it's platform-independent, so it's
easy to deliver electronically on CD-ROM or over the Web.  A big advantage is
that users can search on the entire PDF document at once; in HTML you can only
search on a given HTML file.  Another advantage is that users can easily print
off the entire PDF document, with your original paper formatting intact.

But PDF is still basically paper-oriented.  If you want to really deliver
online information, and make the information very modular, with lots of
hyperlinks to allow users to navigate, HTML is better.  You can also introduce
multimedia into HTML documents.

If you're writing a document specifially for online, skip PDF and do it right
-- with HTML.  Lots of good HTML authoring tools are out there to lead you
through it.

But if you have paper documentation that you still need to have in
print-quality format, but you also want to deliver electronically, PDF is a
very efficient solution that's not hard to do and not hard for users to access.

Scott

Diane Kirsten-Martin wrote:

> I'm new to the list. I'm looking for studies of PDF vs. HTML for online
> documentation. I've been chartered with doing a comparison test on
> usability issues and user preferences for a new documentation set we are
> currently working on. The user's guides will  be created in FrameMaker. I'm
> not yet certain whether in the final act we will be putting the entire new
> document set or just some subset of this online, but I can say at this
> point that it's probably equally easy for our pubs department to turn the
> documents into pdf or html. The decision to do one or the other will be
> based on user preferences (our users are internal).
>
> I'm thinking, for the test, of putting one small user's guide--in pdf and
> html--on a cd, enclosing Acrobat Reader with Search, another search engine
> for the html?, some test questions, some check boxes as to preferences.
>
> The thing is, I want it to be a fair test, but I'm pretty sure that the
> users just want HTML because they think pdf is new, strange, hard to use...
>
> Any help on this issue, either on the usability test or the question in
> general will be appreciated.
>