You’re listening to the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast for the week of 29 September 2008.

AuctioneerTech – Technology, auctions and auctioneers – auction tech for the auction industry

Hello and welcome to the fifth episode of the AuctioneerTech Auction Podcast, my name is Aaron Traffas. In this episode, we’re going to cover the PDF. I’m going to try to explain how to properly use PDFs on the Internet as well as give a couple of faster, easier alternatives to Adobe’s bloated Reader product and discuss some tools to create PDFs without having to use Adobe’s obscenely expensive Acrobat product.

The Portable Document Format or PDF is a file format created by Adobe in 1993. As of July 1, 2008, it’s a certified standard by the International Standards Organization, or ISO, which means that the format is open and published so that anyone can create it or use it.

The advantage that PDF has over other file formats is that it’s a good way to represent printed material exactly as the designer intended it. This advantage makes it good to use for contracts and brochures where the user doesn’t need to change the content and is willing to jump through some extra hoops to view the content in a layout that approximates the printed page. It’s a great format for designers to send to printers because it ensures that the content is displayed exactly as the designer intended.

The disadvantage that PDF has is on the Internet. The Internet isn’t a format that is supposed to resemble the printed page. Because the PDF format – for good reason – isn’t supported directly by any browser, the user must use a browser plug-in to view the content, souring the browsing experience. For this reason, the use of PDFs on websites should be limited to an optional content delivery mechanism.

An example of a very bad use of PDF is for a website selling real estate. The designer used PDF to send the property information document to the printer. The PDF is uploaded to the website and a link is placed on a sparse page that says “download property information document” for information about this property. This practice breaks the first rule of accessible website design, which is don’t force the user to use a plug-in or add-on to view content. Most browsers with the plug-in installed open the page in a new tab, breaking another first rule of web design which is don’t open new tabs or windows. Search engines index PDFs, but if you click on a search result that is a PDF you’ll be taken straight to the PDF which lacks a navigational system for the user to get to your main website.

An example of a proper use of PDF is for the same website to have every piece of information within the property document delivered as valid XHTML and CSS, which is the current best practice for building web pages. That site would then have an optional download for users who want to physically print the information about the property. In this case, the user can browse the property information at browser speeds rather than having to wait for and be confused by the loading of a plug-in. Even the example property contracts should be first delivered as a web page and then made available as PDF for users who want that method as an option.

The very best use of PDF is to not use it at all, instead delivering the content by XHTML and the layout by two different style sheets, one CSS for the screen and one for print, so that the website looks one way on the screen but when the website is printed it looks like the property information document. This is a more advanced website design technique that I’ll try to cover later.

To summarize, PDF has its uses. Just remember that as a content delivery system on the Internet it does fall.

Now that we’ve admitted that there are legitimate uses for PDF on the web, if, after analyzing the situation, PDF seems like the right tool for the job, here are some ways to make its use more painless and less expensive.

Adobe has two products relat[...]