Pathetic Dumb excuse for a File

March 24, 2007

What’s so great about PDFs anyway? I’m sick of coming across these stupid things all over the damn internet.

“Oh, but it shows what the document would look like once printed! It’s so great! Yay!”

No, it’s not great. I mean, I can see where they have their purpose now and then, sure. But you get to some of these webpages that seems like every page is a damn PDF!

Why is that? Did you just figure you’d scan all these papers and upload them to your web server without having to do anything else? That it would be the same? Lazy ass. Learn some damn HTML. Quit having to make me have to run Acrobat just to look at your crap.

Trying to protect your files from being copied? PDFs don’t prevent it from happening. They merely make copying slightly harder, not much harder. If you don’t want the text to be copied so easily, just make the damn thing an image. Accomplishes the same.

And many times, the file in question does not even need all the crap it would gain from a PDF. That can prove more of a hindrance than anything. So many people are like “Oooh, look at me! I paid six hundred dollars for Adobe Acrobat, and found it was completely useless, so I’ll pretend it has a use and make everything I can get my hands on into a pointless PDF! Yay!” 🙄

Just make an HTML page, loser. Require pretty much no effort. People want information. Not to have to wait for the little Adobe Acrobat blurb to appear on screen, for the page to load, and to have a thing pop up telling you to upgrade. Oh, and depending on how old the machine is, having the computer crash during all this.

There are times PDFs are useful. I’m not denying that. But those are mostly professional type stuff. We have legitimate uses for them at work. Nothing online, though. Online they are totally useless.

This one time like two years ago, this place I worked at had a computer that still used Windows 95 (LOL, I know!). And I wanted to check a bus schedule for a Metrobus. Guess what. All the Metrobus schedules are damn PDFs! And the computer was so old it didn’t even have Acrobat on it nor could it install it. So I couldn’t check the damn thing. Bastards. The Ride On site has the schedules on the actual webpage. Metrobus? Nooooo.

Not to mention the very many completely useless and rather hindering situations PDFs appear on the NYRA site.

PDFs for the LOSE!

2 thoughts on “Pathetic Dumb excuse for a File”

  1. I agree, Kat. Being on dialup temporarily, it takes a hella long time for PDFs to open.

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