PDF is Not Always a Good Format

PDF preserves layout and works well for sharing fixed documents, signing, and offline forms. But it is hard to edit, often bloated, and poorly suited for reading on mobile or responsive design.

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By. Jacob

Jacob Kristensen (Turbulentarius) is a Web Developer based in Denmark. He is currently pursuing a Bachelor's degree in Web Development at Zealand, focusing on learning React and refining his existing skills.

Edited: 2025-05-07 11:41

Pros:

• Allows sharing of self-contained documents
• Makes it easy to sign documents or fill out forms offline
• Requires no coding expertise
• Preserves layout and text formatting

Cons:

• Preserving layout and formatting can harm usability
• Difficult to open for reading or editing
• File size can be large depending on content
• Can be copy-protected, which goes against the user's interests

From a user-centric perspective, PDF files are just irritating. They’re often hard to edit or read, and the text doesn’t flow or resize properly, making them incredibly frustrating on mobile devices. The default should be to let text flow and scale freely—like a well-designed web page. There’s no good reason for e-books to use fixed layouts.

There’s likely no technical reason we couldn’t replace PDF with more readable, open, text-based formats. Even .html is surprisingly good for writing documents and has near-universal support.

HTML can also be self-contained if needed, since content can be embedded as base64. In some cases, this might even be more compatible than PDF—for example, with small videos. The fact that HTML might not render exactly the same on all devices doesn’t matter much; if designed properly, it comes close, and the content flows far better by default than in most PDFs.