A .gov entity just saying "no" to PDFs?
I can only applaud. It's about fucking time SOMEONE in government noticed PDFs are a fucking useless waste of bandwidth. Hopefully this will trickle down world-wide ...
The Boundary Commission for Scotland (BCS) has said it will publish shapefiles of its initial proposals for constituencies after the Boundary Commission for England (BCE) was criticised for not doing so. The BCS said it had "watched with interest" the response to the BCE's publication of its initial proposals for …
@Ralph.
And you seem to be using PDFs properly. That kind of "human-readable" use is what they're good for. I used to use them similarly in the digital printing industry.
What they're _Not_ useful for is transmitting information that you might like to be _machine_ readable, like maps that you might want to import into a GIS or mash-up with other data.
"I used to use them similarly in the digital printing industry."
::shudder:: The evil work of marketing.
My own pre-press work is simple film & stripping ... Allows me to express myself (Late '60s Heidelberg Windmill OHT 10X13, early '70s KORD, and a nondescript Chief 217, along with a 40" Polar cutter, currently reside in my print shop).
Don't forget that "machine readable" also includes folks whose eyes may not be quite as perfect as yours are ... If you have information to impart, it's important to get that info out there. Glitter? Maybe not so much ...
What's wrong with PDF is that the vast majority of PDFs would be better off presented as ASCII text, at least from a bandwidth and storage perspective.
I mean, seriously ... I've seen B&W job applications that could be delivered as <40K of ASCII text rendered as >19 Meg PDFs. This is not a positive use of computing resources, no matter how you look at it.
And that word "everyone" ... I don't think it means what you think it does. Many people cannot perceive your "formatting, colo(u)r, fonts, etc." And many of the rest of us don't give a rat's ass about your attempt at "brightening up" what should be a simple document.
@jake: "I've seen B&W job applications that could be delivered as <40K of ASCII text rendered as >19 Meg"
Can't imagine how they achieved that. I quickly tested that - made a plain text file weighing in at 42,293 bytes, and when saved as PDF came to 46,974 bytes. An increase, but hardly significant.
@jake: "many of the rest of us don't give a rat's ass about your attempt at "brightening up" what should be a simple document"
Plain text is fine for some things - source code, config files, etc. Not much use when you're producing anything with images, or documents anything like a book containing table of contents (linking to page numbers), glossary, footnotes, sections, illustrations, hyperlinked cross-references, etc. Fonts, style, and colour do wonders for readability too. Effective communication with human readers is what matters in this case, not size or bandwidth. That might not be your world, but it's essential for many - don't sneer at it. It seems to me the PDF is unmatched in this role.
"Hugh Buchanan, secretary for the Scottish body, explained that it was very important that the Scottish public engage in the consultation."
Yeah, right. That'll be why they are publishing the data in a highly specialised form which a very small number of people will be able to read instead of in a form which almost every computer in the country can display.
Thanks for the coverage of the Guardian Computing story about the Boundary Commission for Scotland’s intention to distribute a shape file of its Initial Proposals for constituencies when these are published on 13 October.
However, your headline is grossly misleading. We will be publishing PDFs as well as distributing a shape file. For many of those interested in the review, PDF remains a very valuable and easy-to-use tool for viewing a map of our Proposals.
Hugh Buchanan
Secretary, Boundary Commission for Scotland