One question: Why do people make PDFs in A4 format? Wouldn't it make better sense to start making them in A5 or A6, so that they could be better read on e-readers, phones, and on part of a computer screen (which is landscape oriented)?
Adapting PDFs for devices won't save us. HTML, being designed around reflow, had the ultimate solution from day one - and yet we've managed to screw that up so badly it spawned a whole industry sub-specialty of "responsive design". When authors start producing multiple PDF versions for different devices and print, how long until someone gets tired of "extra work" and comes up with "responsive PDFs"?
(Also I feel that by default, non-book PDFs tend to show up in the US "Letter" size, which looks deceptively similar to A4, until you try to print it.)
Yes! This is what I keep complaining about! HTML likewise solved accessibility, but then it goes right through the cycle: someone extends it in a way that requires a special reader, then they focus on people with that reader at the expense of everyone else. Unless you stop the cycle from happening, going to a new format doesn't help!
Like you mention, HTML already exists for adaptive text reflow. I assume that people making PDFs want their layouts fixed. But maybe an A5 format would make more sense, even if you're printing it?
Also: What did people screw up with HTML in your opinion?
> Also: What did people screw up with HTML in your opinion?
The problem with PDFs is that you need to create multiple layouts to make them look good in print and on a variety of commonly used screen sizes; all those layouts is extra work. HTML, by its very nature, doesn't have this problem, and yet somehow today we still have to design multiple layouts to support print and common screen sizes. And in practice, we usually don't - instead, we design one layout optimized for mobile phones, and ignore how bad lit looks on desktop or in print. "Responsive web design" turned into forcing HTML to behave like a PDF, except using "iPhone" instead of "A4" as the size.
If you make your PDFs in A5, you can print two of them on an A4 paper and read the paper in landscape orientation. For the same reasons the size fits well for displaying on a computer screen and on a tablet/e-reader. It's still a bit too big to squeeze down to a cell phone, but at least better than A4/Letter size.
As for responsive HTML, it's the responsibility of the designer to make it work if he/she is worth their salt. Like you say, HTML without CSS is already responsive. If businesses understood that there are a big segment of customers who will always use their computer and never their phone when it's time to make a purchase, perhaps they'd be better at it.
I think the point is that if you are designing with that size in mind you may make different decisions about the column layout etc.
I would have thought that a PDF of a book would normally be made in the size of the physical book, which could be A4, but usually isn't (at least not when I look at my bookshelves).
Probably also column layout. 2-column documents are fine for A4 sizes, but terrible for A6 or most e-reader screen sizes. Scroll down, then up & across, then down, then across, then repeat. Versus just scroll down or just turn pages.
Depends which parameter you choose to hold fixed. You could shrink your text and keep the layout and page count or keep your text size fixed and increase the page count. If people were doing layout for a fixed A5 or A6 size they will probably make many different choices compared to laying out for A4.
You must be from North America. In the rest of the world, it’s always A4. I encounter A4 PDFs fairly often, but don’t know how long it would be since I encountered Letter, but easily years.
The more I think about it, the more I'm getting convinced that A4/Letter was a mistake. Maybe we'll see something like A5 as a standard in the future, that would be neat.
