Re: Format of choice for immediate offline reading, easy sharing or simple portability
> The reason why PDF is ubiquitous is simple: you can be 99% certain that it will display properly and legibly on any and all computing devices
Yes and thereby you are missing the point. Your PDF may display perfectly well on a myriad devices. But is that what you wanted?
Or did you want to convey information to other people reliably, efficiently and in an æstethically pleasing manner? Because those two are not the same goal at all.
For a start not everyone is sighted, and those who are have wildly differing capabilities and perceptions both in terms of physiological performance (visual acuity, colour blindness, etc.), and environmental and situational conditions.
There is no doubt that there is a need for picture-perfect layout and presentation in some cases, and PDF is very convenient for that, while still allowing graceful degradation if the file has been packaged properly. But all too often that is not what is required. Think about HTML vs plain-text email if you will or alternatively, thirty years ago we were using typewriters and managing to do the same stuff as we still do, with a single monospace font, underline, bold and two different colours if you were lucky.
At my company, we moved our quality manuals from PDF to Markdown in 2016. The result has been that now people not actually *read* them more often but they are also kept up to date with updates and improvements on most weeks as opposed to once or twice a year.
Why? For a start, they are handy references for many processes that need to be carefully executed so it makes sense to check them out. Then, frequently people access them via their mobile phones, where PDFs are not all that convenient but a nice responsive and accessible HTML rendering is. Lastly, because it's just a Markdown that you can edit with pretty much anything from ed upwards, people actually *do* keep them up to date.
As a bonus, maintaining the quality stuff in a Git repo is rather convenient and about as traceable as you can get.
So you see? Without taking any merit away from PDF which is very useful when needed, I wish it would stop being abused by barely computer literate people who could use their time in better ways than coercing whatever it is they wanted to write out of their word processors, while remaining convinced that it is very important that we should get their horribly formatted and barely legible prose in all its Comic Sans glory.
Let's see how many of you PDF botherers are out there. >:)
Biting the hand that feeds IT
