I actually hate PDF’s. Every once in a while you see someone creating archives of TIFF’s wrapped in PDF’s and you want to cry. Was there ever a situation crying out for librarians?
I’ve seen governments bury their research and reports in PDF’s, presumably out of fear for the contents but mindful of a duty to publish. So they appear on the internet in many forms:
1. PDF wrapped TIFFs – images that are unsearchable and mostly unfndable but look for all intents and appearances like text. A true access chimera.
2. GovDocs exploded into chapters of individual PDF’s. Arrghhh! Let’s make the user try to assemble – in order – that 24 chapter report plus its cover, appendices and indexes into something compehensible. Oh yeah, extra points if it’s in several languages. Of course, a Google free text search won’t assemble all the pertinent pieces easily either
3. Worse, let’s create a 10,000 page PDF and try to ask any citizen to download and print that! If your report is too short to make it too big, just append all your data into the appendices and make it HUGE.
5. Place your PDF on your website and don’t link it to with an index, table of contents, press release or some other finding tool. Make sure there are no links for the seacrh engine crawlers to crawl! You have plausible deniabliity and can say with a straight face that it’s available on the web!
6. And my favourite government opacity strategy? Only place a minimum of metadata on the PDF on the web. Say, just a number like 1237D-f but make sure it’s not linked to any real number and just represents a non-sequential accession number for the web file. Then it will be nigh on impossible to find it.
Thank God for OPACs, Cataolguers and Librarians. Subversive and detectives all.
That said, ironically, here’s a useful link:
Lifehacker’s Top 10 PDF Tricks
The PDF file format is one of the best ways to publish, save and exchange well-formatted documents that will look exactly the same regardless of the device or computer you open them on. Whether it’s your résumé, a tax form, e-book, user guide or a web page, you can’t go wrong using a PDF. Chances are you’ve already got a free PDF reader installed on your computer, but you can do a lot more with your PDF files than you might think.”
Check out the posting for a top 10 list of techniques for converting, exchanging, sharing, managing and editing PDF documents.
Top 10 PDF Tricks
10. Make custom PDF notepaper
9. Convert files to PDF online
8. Annotate PDF’s with Skim
7. Password protect PDF’s
6. Merge PDF files
5. Edit PDF’s with PDF Tools
4. Speed up your PDF reader
3. Manage your PDF library in iTunes
2. Convert that whiteboard to PDF
1. Save any document as a PDF
Stephen
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4 Responses
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It’s a story to me from a friend of a prof who used to walk the dog of a public servant to you (ie. probably an urban myth), but the quote is “if I government does not want people to find a document, the best thing is to put it on the web.”
If something is available on the web, the government doesn’t have to fill out a request for a document. “It’s on the web, dude, go find it yourself.”
Indeed
We need
Librarians.
Great post; PDFs seem to be terribly done 90% of the time.
The title of the post should be, “Six Ways to Destroy Humanity with PDFs (and Ten Ways to Do Them Right)”.
I deal with zillion of them every single day and I hate them all. I especially hate it when you aren’t warned that a link is a PDF, and it turns out to be one of those huge suckers that starts downloading, taking over your machine until it finishes.
With that in mind, if you’re a Firefox user, I highly recommend the PDF Download extension: “This extension, every time you click on a link, checks if the target is a pdf file and in this case lets you choose what you want to do (open pdf file inside or outside Firefox, download it to the filesystem or view it as HTML).” It also (usually) displays the size of the PDF, so you know what you’re dealing with before you mess with it.
This thing has made my life so much easier that I actually made a donation to its creator. Wonderful extension.
Some of these problems seem to come from experiences with bad software. Acroread is shit, PDF as a format is great!