I was just thinking, idly, once again, about PDF documents and how difficult they can be to use. Since I always assume that there is someone who can speak authoritatively about anything (and I mean accurately, too, not just full of blithe self assurance and dismissive hand-waves), I wondered: who can tell me what, if anything, is known about the best kind of text organization for different kinds of use -- research, study, reading, note-taking. Surely there must be some idea. But who would know?
Hmm....
5 comments:
Not I, unfortunately. *sigh*
Well, you *might*, though. Even if, like me, you can't answer the question, I would bet that you are able to frame it, or participate in framing it. And thats one of the steps toward deriving a lucid answer. Its also one of the steps that I miss, because I usually wonder about things that more 'normal' people don't. You know -- people with an actual life!
Ah yes .. people with an actual life. Must be nice. ;)
I'm not sure what you mean by 'framing', but I do know that when I pdf a word doc, it makes it much smaller and easier to email or post on message boards as attachments. That's the extent I happen to know. I may use a program, but how it works or what steps it takes to make it work can be much beyond my intelligence, or lack there of.
Sorry that I was so vague -- I do that sometimes. What I meant was that while neither of us may know the answer, we can probably come up with a clear, specfic question -- ie, frame the question. In so doing, we would essentially determine what answer we are looking for. Without that framing, it becomes a vague answer to a vague question; most unsatisfying.
I guess what I'm getting at is this. PDF documents are excellent for bundling up information. It makes them easily portable, and, with the reader software, the person who is reading it doesn't have to have the massive software that created it -- ie, Microsoft Word or the equivilent. This is good.
But it pays no attention to the way that the document is used. If what you want is something that you will read from start to finish (or just about) then the PDF is fine. But if you want to FIND something in the doc, the search capaility is fairly abysmal (not that Word's is all that much better). Theres nothing like 'find this word if its within X positions of that word'; 'Find variants'; 'find most common'. Its just a brute force search.
Also, unlike a Word doc, its tough to find pages. The page numbering inthe document almost never matches the page numbering of PDF, so if you happen to look in the documents index, and find a page number, its tedious to go and find it.
I don't think either of these is a big, big deal, and certainly they are not a reason not to use PDF. What I was thinking, though, was that just as Word is a good basic text creation tool, and PDF is a good tool to make data portable (no pun intended), perhaps there is another tool that makes data easily searchable; makes it possible to bookmark easily; makes it possible to backtrack through a document. Kind of a meta-editor.
Thats deep, I know, and I could be blathering in the dark. I do that, too.
I think I've allowed all that to sink into my brain. hee!
But seriously, I get what you're saying, but wouldn't have if you hadn't pointed it out.
Yes, very deep. ;)
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