The Nielsen Norman Group has an interesting article on PDFs and the Web and why they should never be read online. The article says that the group first reported this conclusion 20 years ago and nothing that’s happened in the mean time has changed their minds.
I was really surprised by their vehemence. They describe PDFs as “unfit for human consumption” and give a long list of reasons why this is so. Their main point is not that PDFs, per se, are bad but that they should never be used when you could use a Web page instead.
I’ve heard that sentiment expressed before and didn’t understand it then either. I’m not arguing that you should build a Web site out of PDFs—of course—but it’s also not true that PDFs have no place on the Web. Some examples: a whole or part of a book, a legal document, formal reports, and theses. I’m sure there are others.
I also don’t think their reasons are well founded. For instance, they claim that PDFs are (very) slow to load and give an example of a restaurant menu that took 3 minutes to load. I’ve loaded entire books in just a few seconds and most PDFs that I’ve looked at load faster than the HTML pages—with all their JavaScript and tracking scripts—that link to them. I don’t find their other reasons any more convincing.
Still, they say that users hate PDFs. That doesn’t sound right to me but maybe that’s because I don’t feel that way. Perhaps I’m wrong. What do you think?