CTO Articles
Published in IT World
October 10, 2006
To print or not to print, that is the question
What is the first thought that enters your head when you click on a link in a web page and a PDF document opens up on front of you?
My first thought generally is "do I really want to read this?" followed by "how many pages is this thing anyway?" followed by "I'll print it now and read it later."
I find that I have developed a survival tactic while browsing which goes something like this. If I stumble across something interesting that appears to be small, I will read it straight away. Otherwise, I bookmark it and generally print it. Over time, I build up large boxes of printed stuff on the floor of my office. I harvest these boxes for handfuls of reading material when I am traveling. I find it an excellent way of ensuring that I have something important to read yet retain a sort of "lucky dip" aspect to the experience.
It will not come as a surprise, given what I have just said, that my offline reading material is heavily PDF based. There is something about PDF that shouts PRINT ME OUT and I generally yield to that plea.
There are two interesting aspects to this I think. Firstly, and most simply, anything I find in PDF form goes into my "read it but don't read it now" list. Consequently, anything that requires immediate action that is published in PDF is not going to work well with me. By the same token, anything that requires me to be online as I read will equally not work well.
Secondly, I occasionally find myself reading significant quantities of text via a web browser without printing it out. So, my trigger for printing something for later consumption, is not simply a matter of the size of the content to be read. Most of the time the larger stuff is in PDF but that is not the whole story. There must be more to it than that.
I think it is partly down to the fact that an inter-linked set of web pages can "creep up on you" in terms of the volume of content you are consuming without you realizing it. With PDF on the other hand, the page count screams out at you. 120 pages. Ugh! Print it. Read it later.
Then of course there is the standard observation that PDF documents are harder to read online. As my screen size and resolution has improved over the years, I find this less of an issue but it still is an issue. It is amazing the difference that switching from a serif font to a sans serif font will do for the legibility of online text. Nothing triggers my "print it" reflex faster than Times Roman font.
There is also the standard observation that PDFs tend to load monolithically, making it difficult to read the content quickly. Flash Paper from Adobe[1] addresses that issue. Although I have yet to come across any sites that make extensive use of Flash Paper, I confess I find myself reaching for the print button with these too.
So far, this might sound a bit negative about PDF and Flash Paper. Time to switch some negativity towards plain vanilla web pages then. One of the nice things about hitting "print" on a PDF is that you know you are going to get properly printed pages with (generally) a high density of content per page.
Contrast that with web pages. These have a horrible habit of disappearing off the right hand side of the printed page. If you are lucky, the site will have a "print version" button. If you are unlucky, you will find yourself swapping into landscape mode for printing. I find reading large volumes of material in landscape mode very unappealing.
In my ideal world, every web page would be a true web page optimized for online reading. In the top right hand corner of each of these web pages would be a PDF button that would generate, on the fly, a serif font PDF for the current page or the current group of pages.
That would be a good compromise between the online and print worlds I think. All things considered, I cannot see the volume of material I print for offline reading going down any time soon. If anything, I see it going up as I try to fit ever more reading into the same amount of available reading time.
I doubt I am alone. For me the phrase "read it online" is more accurately re-phrased as "find it online, print it and read it later." So much to read. So little time.
[1] http://www.adobe.com/products/flashpaper/