No PDFs!
November 1st, 2009
The Sunlight Foundation explains that posting PDFs is a poor way to make data available. +1.
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- Greg Wilson on I Hope Someone Has Already Built This
Physicists face the same problem. Everybody publishes and communicated through arxiv.org for free. This is recorded forever by a library.
However, what do you do with data, algorithms for the data, and simulations? You can only post PDFs to the arxiv, which can summarize millions of lines of code and petabytes of data.
I was just ranting about this in the office on Friday. I can’t stand when people choose PDF for sharing data. I don’t care how pretty it looks; I just want the data and others can worry about displaying it in a prettier way.
“PDFs are notoriously challenging because they are difficult for computers to index and people to search”
I think Google might be willing to argue about this. I know I’ve pulled all of the data tables for a computerized role-playing game out of the (scanned!) PDFs of the original rulebook, and non-scanned PDFs are even easier to work with…
Top five reason why not use pdf.
-Limited to certain platforms and with certain Assistive Technology
-Some PDF files are completely inaccessible, but you don’t know until you try
-Reading order of content may not be the same as the print book
-Some of the information may not be accessed
-Navigation to a specific page may be not be possible or may be unreliable