To PDF or Not PDF, Part 1
At a recent management meeting, the topic of policy and procedure manuals came up. When I said I was buying new binders for all departments, the response was incredulous. "You mean you don't have yours online
yet?"
In fact, we do, as PDF files on a Microsoft Sharepoint server. Two years ago (see here), I was convinced that this was the accessibility solution. But a funny thing happened on the way to the paperless lab.
No one used them. No one read them. A mandatory review of policies had techs leafing through paper manuals, yellowed sheet protectors and all. Searchable, unblemished and original copies online were better in almost every way--so why? I needed to rethink the PDF.
The Portable Document Format was created by Adobe Systems in 1993. A PDF, viewable with the free Adobe Reader, lets you share procedures, articles, catalogues, brochures--anything that can be printed. The document is compressed (using a flate algorithm, viz. deflate and inflate) and can contain images, special fonts and links to Web pages. It's perfect for any document where looks matter.
The word "portable" is misleading. We often think of portable as something that's easy to carry--I owned a portable typewriter--but for computers, it means software that runs on different computers with different operating systems. Theoretically, a PDF looks exactly the same on a PC, Mac or Linux system. Also important if looks matter.
A PDF is portable (if the correct version of the free Reader is installed) but what is it? It is an image of a printed document. If you print a PDF, the piece of paper in your hand will look exactly like the screen. In a busy laboratory where there are policies and procedures an arms length away on the bench, what does an electronic duplicate of a printed page accomplish?
To answer that, next I'll consider how paper is better.