Why didn't you tell me it’s a #$%*ing PDF?
Posted on January 10, 2006 | 2 Comments | No TrackBacks
This entry will be a slight rant about a pet peeve I have. I’m reading some information on a site about a product I’m interested in. I see a link for more information on the product. I click it. My PC slows to a crawl as my browser loads Acrobat and attempts to open a 7meg PDF file. Why? Why would you not tell me I’m opening a PDF… a 7meg PDF?
I don’t hate PDFs. This one was actually quite useful and I’m glad I was able to get it. However, it would’ve been nice to know what it was so that I could right click and save it, rather than having it open in the browser window. Note to Adobe: I love your stuff but you need to make some serious improvements to the Acrobat plugin. I have 2.5 gigs of RAM, it shouldn't take this long to open a PDF.
If you’re a web developer… and you probably are if you’re reading this… I make the following request to you. Putting PDFs on your site is great but please let your users know that it’s a PDF. If it’s a large file, put the file size there as well. Format your links something like...
Download the widget fact sheet (PDF, 7megs)
Maybe use a little PDF icon... something. The same would go for Word Docs or Excel files to. If I'm clicking something and it's not another HTML page, then let me know.... please?
There is an extension for Firefox that alerts you when you are opening a PDF, and gives you options to open in a tab, or not at all, etc.
Good pet peeve. On a similar tangent, many corporate sites provide PDF as the only format option for content that one would expect to be in HTML format such as press releases.
PDF seems to be the best fit functionally for those documents where you wish to preserve the look-and-feel of an original print document (annual report, brochure, etc) which would be hard to reproduce in HTML.