what is up with .pdf files?

malcolm

Does anyone else think this is the most useless frustrating format ever created. Given I have not done any research in to the benefits of saving data to a .pdf but every time I have to deal with one I am frustrated and disappointed. The frame rate is horrible as soon as there are images being displayed and the navigation is crap, why not just use a word doc? Any one actually like these files?

iMag

I have no problem with them. adobe acrobat reader 7 which was recently released speeds things up greatly, at least for loading within the web browsers. Main reason pdf is there is because no matter what machine or os (mac, linux or pc) a pdf will always look the same. which isn't garunteed with word.

I find word documents to be horrible compared to pdf's if images are involved.

JKMakowka

Exactly, if you don't want to alter the documents, pdfs are great... they always look the same, can be printed really easy, and most important, don't change filespecifications with every new word version just to deliberatly brake compatibility with competing products.

I hate it when there is a document only available as a .doc! Thats the worst format ever.

adam

When your job consists of 50% output, you tend to LOVE pdf files. They're a what-you-see-is-what-get program. The only thing they can throw off from the original file is the colour once its printed, but that's easily fixed.

PDF's are great.

Hollowmind

It's a pretty useful format. Best thing about it is it leaves vector art as vector art. Plus they can be opened in Photoshop or Illustrator and edited that way. Doesn't mean much to the game artist but for regular graphic artists, like me, it's very, very useful. I love it when clients send me what they want printed in pdf format, especially if it's vector art since we primarily use Illustrator here.

jzero

PDF is the greatest for what I do. It lets me send the same data that would go to a printer into a file, which the average braindead executive can open and look at and see what I have actually done. And they can't change anything. That's the weakness of Word -- they could open it up and start making changes.

I like getting manuals and other documents on CD that look exactly like the printed version, also.

malcolm - what do you mean 'the frame rate is horrible'?? It's not like PDF is an animation format. If you have slow screen redraws, you might take stock of your system. Could also be something you're doing with the documents you create -- if you have a graphic created in PowerPoint that has a color set to more than 0% transparency, the PDF conversion will be the most bloated, slowly-redrawing mess you can imagine. Post details or send me a PM here if you are having a specific problem.

/jzero

ElysiumGX

I think PDF's are somewhat slow, but maybe i should upgrade my reader. They're not slow enough for me to ignore the benefits. I've been given concept docs for games in Word format, and couldn't open the file correctly no matter how a tried. Many teachers have difficulty transfering their class assignments to school computers for printing. I always urge people to download OpenOffice because of it's ability to save all Word formats, plus PDF's. It just makes life easier.

Microsoft: capatibility is our middle name.

KDR_11k

I think they're uncomfortable for reading and for electronic documentation HTML or plain TXT should be used instead. They are great for geting data to the printer, though.

jzero

You'd be surprised at the number of people for whom dragging and dropping is an unknown skill. People who run all their apps full-screen and have never seen two windows open side by side at once. People who blink in incomprehension as I say "Drag the HTML file to an Internet Explorer window."

It's much easier just to say "open the PDF". And since most of my output is from InDesign, it's the next logical step.

/jzero

Slayerjerman

LARGE PDF files are teh suck. You get one thats over 50mb and the fucking thing crawls trying to open it (on any machine). I dont mind PDFs that much, atleast they are compatible machine to machine. Unlike alot of video files where you end up spending alot of time downloading and installing 5000000 different fucking codecs. Talk about annoying.

KDR_11k

jzero: Shouldn't HTML files open by double-clicking them?

malcolm

You guys have listed a lot of benefits to .pdf and I am yet to see any of these present. I don't author this crap though so perhaps there are secret tricks to make them work, the producers at work give me these shit documents as an overview to try and design the environments I am working on, I have 1gig ram 2.1 gig p4 processor and quadro 2 video card and as soon as an image appears on my document the the scroll bar and refresh drops to 1.5 frames per second, pretty much useless to try and view these things. Also these documents eat up all my ram and then I have to restart my computer because Maya won't refresh and starts to get video corruption while I have the .pdf file open, the guy I sit beside has the same problem too and always asks me why we have to use these things. And last night my girlfriend wanted me to print her .pdf file from the university web site and the jack ass that made it did not save the text as text, it was all bitmaps so I could not scale it and the type was super big and took 14 pages when it only needed to take 6. I got a game once where the instructions came in a .pdf file and that was frustrating as well, super slow to scroll and the text pops instead of scrolling smoothly, I could have accomplished these exact same documents I am getting with a simple .jpg and it would load instantly and I can look at it easily in ACDSEE. See I guess the reason .pdf exists is because any random dude can get the viewer and look at these things allowing the trade of information to and from unskilled users?

snemmy

the problem pdfs may not be compressed. if they just dump artwork and junk in there without flattening anything it will take up huge amounts of memory. for my senior portfolio last spring i was able to compress my 300mb pdf to 6mb ;]

Asthane

[ QUOTE ]
LARGE PDF files are teh suck. You get one thats over 50mb and the fucking thing crawls trying to open it (on any machine).

[/ QUOTE ]

I routinely use 100-200 meg PDF's and never have any speed issues whatsoever. I just stopwatched it, in fact, and it took roughly 2.67 seconds to open a 109 meg pdf file (Exalted: Abyssals PnP book). Scrolls smooth as any document, jumping to random pages has no load time, etc. So I really don't know where the problems people express in this thread are comming from. Must be badly made .pdf's

But hey, at least a bad PDF can still be viewed They really needs different extensions for all the different kinds of .doc formats (Not to mention, I don't want to have to install some bloated word processor/office package just to view people's files)

[ QUOTE ]
I got a game once where the instructions came in a .pdf file and that was frustrating as well, super slow to scroll and the text pops instead of scrolling smoothly, I could have accomplished these exact same documents I am getting with a simple .jpg and it would load instantly and I can look at it easily in ACDSEE. See I guess the reason .pdf exists is because any random dude can get the viewer and look at these things allowing the trade of information to and from unskilled users?

[/ QUOTE ]

You forget printable quality as well. In order to be able to print that manual, you'd need a set of images at 300dpi or so, which is not a usable size on a computer. Now, if they just scanned pages and slapped them in a PDF file, perhaps, however that would be like saying printers suck because someone gave you a .txt file to print and it was just plain text with no formatting or anything

Depending on how they're made, PDF files can also be searchable, have a clickable table of contents, etc. PDF's are great if the author makes use of what is there.

malcolm

Well apparently all the .pdf files I have encountered thus far are poorly authored, as there are no book marks, no text, no frame rate, and no print quality because they are all bitmaps scanned in fromphoto copies.