One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web)
PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.
I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.
Plenty of software can edit pdfs. I have used affinity designer in past to fix up issues in PDFs received from designers.
Seems like this can be better addressed by versioning and audit logs or checksums.
Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable record, I at least have to trust Notion.
I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed on, or I need to be able to download the document in a readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which case we're back at PDF again.
It doesn't need to be optimized, but it should be possible to achieve things like static PDF or printout.
Is it becoming niche? Yeah, probably, but we might want to think of it as being niche in the way that accessibility features are niche.
Anytime I need to read big documents I just export them and put it on it. Easy for the eyes and easy to take note on the document.
Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.
