Ranting and Raving about PDFs

Doc Searls, Jeff Jarvis, and others have been raving like lunatics about how much they loathe the PDF format chosen for the ChangeThis publication. There's a whole crowd out there insisting that Seth Godin reconsider PDF and support HTML as well. Seth's not buying it so far, arguing that ChangeThis articles (or "Manifestos" as the ChangeThis people prefer them to be called) are more like books, and less like web pages.

A lot of the ranters are complaining that PDFs aren't searchable. Since when? I search PDFs all the time, no problem. Of course, I'm using Preview.app, the MacOS X application that among other things does a fine job presenting PDF files. In fact, I prefer it greatly over Adobe Acrobat.

Setting aside these issues, I have to agree with the ranters that ChangeThis ought to be available in a more open format --- keep the PDFs around for the PDF purists, but for the bloggers looking to read, study, link to, copy, and paste text, give 'em HTML. Geez, one would think that a Manifesto is supposed to be read far and wide. Here's a bunch of blogger enablers who would voluntarily help with the "far and wide" part. One would think Seth and Company would embrace their offer...

Posted by brian at December 6, 2004 11:14 AM