If you are unlucky, you might get me started explaining why I am so annoyed by PDF files.
This is a quick note to explain myself, so that next time somebody brings up this pet peeve of mine, I can send them this link and not talk their ear off about it.
The short answer:
PDFs have fixed layout which makes them very annoying to read on anything other than printed paper
PDFs often make it difficult to copy text out of them, making quoting, note-taking, or reformatting very annoying
PDFs do not allow the reader to easily change their style to accommodate reading preferences (e.g. increasing font size)
Don’t believe me? Here’s the Australian government:
Only create PDFs if your research shows there are specific needs for this format.
Participants in several of our recent usability studies on corporate websites and intranets did not appreciate PDFs and skipped right over them. They complained woefully whenever they encountered PDF files and many who opened PDFs quickly abandoned them.
PDF is a file format commonly used for transferring “finished” files around.
It is difficult and tedious (but not impossible at all) to edit PDF documents.
This leads some people to consider PDFs more “secure” or somehow more “permanent” than other file formats.
However, I think they are vastly overused.
PDFs are great if you need to print something, but they’re not a great way to communicate information to other people in today’s world.
While designers like the ability to lay things out just so on an exactly-determined page size, this isn’t how I, or a lot of people, want to read your content.
I often read on a mobile device like a phone or e-reader.
Even when I’m reading on a laptop or desktop computer, I often find the design choices made in some documents distracting.
And I don’t even (currently) have any visual or cognitive impairment that means I have especially demanding needs when reading.
What to do instead?
If you are publishing content on a website, just make an HTML page.
Whatever website publishing platform you are using is spitting out HTML pages all day; use it!
HTML pages, when not trying to imitate highly polished print design like a PDF, are responsive to users’ preferences, device sizes, font size and contrast preferences, etc.
And, as a bonus, web browser features like “reader mode” allows the user to strip away distracting styles and focus on your content.
If you aren’t publishing for the web, but maybe communicating information privately, consider what other file formats you can share.
If you use e.g. Google Docs to produce documents, consider sharing a read-only link to the Google Document itself instead of publishing it to a PDF. This allows some customisability for the reader.
If you must, you can share a Microsoft Word document.
This will at least allow your audience to more easily select text, or even export the document in their preferred format.
Something you may not know is that HTML files are just files, and can be shared the same way you share a PDF.
You can try it now - in your browser, right click this very page you’re reading, select “Save page as…”, choose a filename, then email it to a friend as an attachment!
Ultimately, I wish more users were familiar with plain-text formats like Markdown, or even Rich Text Format, for writing simple documents.
I also wish there was a popular text editor, like a Microsoft Word, focused on documents with simple, accessible content, and using HTML or similar as its file format.
A special place in the underworld is reserved for:
Anybody sharing data which should be machine-readable as a PDF file.
If your PDF contains lots of tables and numbers… consider sharing them as CSV files instead.
You can even zip them all up together to keep them from going astray.
(Microsoft Excel files are no good, for a whole other set of reasons I am not going into in this post about PDFs.)
Sometimes, I get to tell someone who didn’t know that the internet depends critically on vast networks of subsea cables which connect all the earth’s continents.
This usually happens with people who don’t work in tech, but even those who are professional web developers learn this at some point.
People are usually surprised, as if they had thought about it, the idea that the internet happens “in the cloud” often leads them to the impression that most of the internet’s communication happens “through the air” like radio.
I myself was surprised, when I looked into it, that we’ve been doing this since the 1850s:
Recently, I’ve started following an industry blog which tracks developments in subsea cables.
This short recent post stood out to me as a very neat example that demonstrates how the internet gets built.
Here’s most of this very short post, and one of the maps:
Microsoft has applied for several maritime usage licenses to do ship surveys of proposed routes for new subsea cables connecting Ireland to the UK. Its SOBR2 cable will connect Ireland to Wales as opposed to the usual Cornwall landings. It will apparently land at Malahide Beach and/or Portmarnock on the Irish side.
It is not clear to me whether the intent is to branch the cable or whether there are two landing options. Details are sparse on the cable itself. My educated guess would be a 96 pair unrepeatered cable because it minimizes capex and maximizes bandwidth punch with such systems easily handling a couple petabits per second.
The site survey will focus on the top three meters of the sea floor. It will take samples to ascertain the texture and composition of material with an eye towards a deep burial of the cable itself. The samples will help determine not only burial depth but also how well armoured the cable will be. The Irish Sea is notorious for fibre cuts due to fishing. The Sea is heavily trafficked.
This terse summary refers to so many things we don’t usually consider when we wonder how our internet traffic gets to servers in America or Europe:
Maritime usage licenses from the nations which govern waters the cable will be laid in
Surveying routes and the geology of the sea floor
Choosing places for the cable to “land” at each end (the impact assessment contains a wealth more detail)
Technical details of the cable construction (including whether it needs to be armored against fishing vessels!)
Last year, I was lucky enough to visit Cornwall.
I learned that some of the earliest transantlantic cables landed there - being, of course, one of the westernmost points of the English isles.
Sennen Cove, near Land's End. This is not where the cables landed, but it's a nice photo.
This is behind the reference in the post above to the “usual Cornwall landings”.
My work in tech doesn’t usually need me to care about infrastructural details like this.
But I really enjoy knowing a bit about how the world around me fits together, what it is made of.
Ursula Franklin was a scientist, author, activist and Quaker who wrote, among many things, on technology.
De-escalate speed, and also de-escalate vocabulary.
Much of our vocabulary comes, again, out of production and advertising.
I think we might make a pact with each other never to use the word “awesome”.
I think the world was fine without the word awesome.
De-escalate vocabulary, de-escalate hype.
I consider reflecting on the ways my vocabulary and attitudes are shaped by a consumerist and technological society to be part of my spiritual practise.
Hype and marketing lead us awayh from the truth in order to influence others.
I want to remember, when I am trying to be persuasive, to influence using truth, not exaggeration.
It’s good enough if things work.
Everything doesn’t have to be “splendid”, “cutting edge”, “world class”.
Those are responses to production.
See where those things come from.
It’s very poor practice to hurry on your plants in the winter; when we have fluorescent lights all our plants get spindly and look miserable.
There is nothing to speed per se.
Like efficiency, speed has a direction.
It is not its own virtue; it depends on towards what we are speeding.
And while there are many injustices we wish to speed away from, speed allows or necessitates us to miss details, to omit nuance, sometimes to fail to attend adequately to reality.
Zulip is a team chat app, broadly similar to Slack or Microsoft Teams.
When the Future of Coding community started considering Slack alternatives earlier this year, I was reminded that Zulip exists.
They didn’t end up moving to it, but I got interested.
I am in several Slacks, for my day job and a couple of community groups.
The difference when I open Zulip is noticeable.
Zulip has a snappier and denser UI.
But it’s the way messages are grouped into topics that makes it really easy to ignore a bunch of messages that I don’t need to read.
That makes it much faster to get a broad sense of “what’s happening” and then focus on chats I actually care about.
On a personal level, I wish groups with ideological commitments would consider supporting Zulip, a small independent company funded by its customers whose owners are intimately involved in building the product.
Rather than Slack (sold to Salesforce) or Discord (raised hundreds of millions of dollars).
I really hope to see more communities and companies considering Zulip as a viable alternative to the corporate players.
Many people in tech are obsessed with exponential growth.
But I wonder…
Are things which look like exponential growth always the spread of an idea between humans?
Are they always ideas whose implementation can be easily parallelized or distributed, so that as the idea spreads, the growth of its implementation is not bottlenecked?
Where the growth of an idea was not exponential, was that because its implementation couldn’t proceed in a decentralised way?
Was it because the material resources needed for its implementation weren’t already widely available, ready to be put to use?
Is the end of exponential growth (the top of the S curve) due to saturation of the idea among humans?
