My mainstay home computer was rendered unconscious in July. He was four years old (purchased in 2006) and having serious problems—the kind that provoked me to start price shopping for new rigs. Luckily, a fresh hard drive and operating system install did the trick, and he’s running better than I can recall.

Getting setup on a new computer can be a pain. You have to shuffle through box after box to find purchased software and then sit around while each application slowly gets back up and running. (Pro tip: Ninite makes the free, downloadable stuff easier to get).

This time around, I didn’t install Adobe Reader. Reader is an unnecessarily bulky application for viewing PDFs. I’m not sure why I have failed to get it on here, but my subconscious rationale is probably wrapped in the general chilling effect that stems from required restarts after software installs.

PDFs are great for electronic books and printable forms. Those are perfectly acceptable use cases and honestly, a preferred format over HTML. Unfortunately, PDFs are also used for much more basic content. You’ve experienced this when you click on a link and the Adobe Reader application unexpectedly launches. (And if you don’t have Adobe Reader, you are effectively locked out from viewing that content).

Offenders

The intramural sports facility website at Michigan State University is an offender. This morning, I wanted to look up their building hours so I could know whether or not the gyms are available for basketball. Their hours are locked away in a 29 Kilobyte PDF. I had to pull out my phone (which, thankfully, has PDF-viewing software on it) to find out they are indeed open from 10 a.m. to 7 p.m.  How difficult would it be to put that information in simple HTML?

Restaurants are a more classic PDF offender. They pay someone’s nephew a few hundred dollars to get a website online. What’s the easiest way to get their menu online? Scan it in, silly! My favorite local sushi establishment locks their dinner menu away in a 12 Megabyte PDF. Even on a phone with PDF-viewing software, that puppy takes minutes to download.

Where do the PDFs come from?

The PDF problem crops up when documents are born offline. Someone punches up a Word doc or crafts a beautiful layout in Adobe InDesign; porting it to the web takes more time. The intent isn’t at all malicious; rather, people are at least putting the information online in some format rather than not at all. I admire the effort.

The extra time is worth it

Most of the people using your website will have Adobe Reader and will be able to access whatever you’ve decided to lock away in a PDF. It’s a minor hassle, and we’re used to it.

But for people like me, and anyone using a mobile device, the extra time you put into converting valuable content to HTML is totally worth it. Little things like this to can make or break an experience.

If you’re a PDF offender, please don’t take offense. I don’t hate you. But if you have some free time today, you can help make the web a better place. And if you’re cranking out a lot of PDFs, you can start changing your process so that someday your documents are born in HTML.