[LINK] "The pdf graveyards can only expect an increase in their undead populations"

[rfmcdonald]

Steven Poole's opinion piece in The Guardian about the rather large number of PDF-format documents which never get read somewhat misses the point. Open document standards are nice, sure, but could it be that many of these documents aren't expected to be read by many people, or read off the Internet (as opposed to as an E-mail attachment)?

What does the kind of email attachment you choose to send say about you? Are you an apologetic corporate slave, a hippie freedom fighter, or a paranoid hacker? We don't often give much thought to the various kinds of electronic file types that zip around the internet, except when they annoyingly fail to open on our computers. But embedded in them are all sorts of political and economic choices.

File types are not generally thought of, for instance, as making much difference to global progress and the smooth accumulation of human knowledge. But could it be that the humble pdf is hurting democracy? That is the question posed by Alex Hern, after a World Bank report noted sadly that few of its research papers (offered as pdfs on its site) are downloaded much, and nearly a third have never been downloaded at all.

The pdf, or portable document format, was invented by Adobe to solve a real problem – how to make an electronic document incorporating text and images that looked the same on any operating system. But the problem is that it's hard to get the data back out of a pdf and use it. Text is usually searchable – the World Bank report itself notes that Google indexes pdfs to count citations of articles – but there's no chance of scraping the underlying data from embedded charts and graphs. Condemn public research to that format and you end up with what White House open data project fellow Nathaniel Manning mournfully calls "PDF graveyards".

Poor pdfs. On this argument, electronic file types are an ecosystem freed from the pressures of natural selection, in which unfit species don't die out but keep shambling around like data-hoarding zombies. But I'm not sure we should all abandon the pdf just yet. It's true that it is a lovably clunky relic of the days when everyone thought "desktop publishing" was the future. (I for one have never felt less athletic than when struggling to make Adobe "Acrobat" fill in a simple pdf form.) But what is the alternative?