You would find a lot of the content on the internet as PDF documents because it is one of the most popular and accessible formats that can be converted to and from several formats such as Excel to PDF, Word to PDF, JPG to PDF, etc. However, we should be rethinking our reliance on PDFs for the following reasons:
Data Is Not Open
The data available and information available in PDFs is human-readable but not machine-readable. There are now tools available that can extract information from PDFs in the form of text but any data or information embedded in graphics or formatted for presentation is not easily accessible.
Poor Findability
One of the reasons to rethink PDF reliability is because most of the PDF documents on the internet don’t have any title while any other form of content published on the internet at least has a title generated for it. When any piece of content is untitled then it means poor findability because titles are important for searching content on the internet and they are the labels through which the content appears in search results.
Measuring Content Use Is Limited
Measuring content use is also limited with PDF documents because we cannot see the statistics of how the content or which part of the content is being used. Although we can get the download statistics and that is it, we cannot find out which part of the PDF do people like to read or whether they even opened the PDF or not.
User Experience Suffers
User experience also suffers greatly and usability testing has shown that people have more problems when the content is in the form of a PDF document than web pages because when they click a link then instead of being able to view the page, an unexpected download starts and if the file size is big then the users bail out instead of continuing further. So, users have to struggle with PDFs to even access simple information.
