An interesting post by a bloger made me……

An interesting post by a bloger made me……

I agree that automatic adaptation to arbitrary display sizes is a difficult goal. However we are so used to paper that we forget its own limitations. The reader has no control over the fonts, and authors go irritatingly non-linear in their layouts by placing digressive boxes here and there.

I never know whether to break off the main flow to read those boxes, or go back to read them later. As for fonts, I have a temporary eye problem which I can get round on web pages by changing the text size. Not so easy in a PDF layout short of zooming the whole thing, which is not what I want.

So paper layouts have their problems, it’s just we are so used to them that we never question them.

I wonder if on paper and in digital form we are trying too hard. We forget that users should be able to exert some influence of their own. They should be able to turn images and waffly formats on and off. They should have control over fonts and colours if they wish — to get round problems such as coloured backgrounds that make it a strain to read text — or simply because (as in my case) I find fiddly serif fonts such as Times New Roman distasteful.

Of course that amount of user freedom is something that may make authors recoil in horror, but that attitude goes against the empowering of individuals that the internet can provide. Inevitably it is going to come with web 2.0, where text will eventually be published in accessible hierarchical structure whose components can be analysed programmatically, leading to the possibility of user-chosen user-configurable renderers, of which perhaps PDF may be one.

Regarding Paul’s points: yes we definitely do want an electronic version of print for lots of reasons – simple universal design rich output from any application, archiving, collaboraton, secure signing and so on. But I absolutely take your point about onscreen viewing of PDFs being less than optimal at the best of times and pretty much unworkable on mobiles. The problem is that, yes, a reflowable design rich layout adaptive to screen size is a lot to ask for. Drop the design-rich and you have html which is obviously great for lots of things but no-one would choose to read the New Scientist for pleasure like that (I’m a subscriber too and you get online access to the entire archive but it’s just not the same thing). The good news is that everyone is aware of the problem and working on adaptive layout– ie shrink the window size and the number of columns and size of images and point size etc changes. Adobe Labs showed some new adaptive layout technology for Flash a while back but the best current option comes from Microsoft but is limited to WPF machines. If they can do something similar via the cross-platform Silverlight then things should get very interesting.

More generally: Steve’s enterprise-level just leave it as simple fixed text and Paul’s cutting-edge adaptive layout requirements shows what a challenge Adobe faces. As I said in the piece I think Acrobat.com’s PDF to Flash conversion is a useful bridge. Maybe if at some point the Flash version can automatically and intelligently adapt layouts to screen size too (not simple) then everyone will be happy.

I get the digital edition of New Scientist magazine which uses a similar approach with another proprietary viewer. Short of a display with unimaginable resolution I cannot get a whole page height on the screen and still be able to read it. Likewise, is this a solution to anything?

We need to get away from paper sizes and accept that people actually use computers these days.

More generally I take your point about Flash and its reputation for distracting from the content it is meant to serve but would argue that that’s blaming the platform rather than the designers. Moreover as a platform Flash has moved on a long way since its vector animation roots and these days is all about delivering content whether vectors, bitmaps, audio, video or text.

Within the offline PDF context I think any universal document format these days really needs to be able to reliably cover audio, video and end user interaction. Within the online context of Acrobat.com there wouldn’t be any content without Flash – it’s delivering it all.

In fact to take advantage of free online services such as Acrobat.com, Buzzword, ConnectNow and Photoshop Express you might well decide to turn FlashBlock off rather than Flash.