undefined | Better HN

0 pointsNoPicklez2y ago0 comments

It isn't "somehow" there are some legitimate reasons why.

When I send a client a final document (that's not intended to be edited) in a .PDF format you can almost guarantee that it will look the same to them as it did for me. When I send someone a Word document, I can't guarantee that it will look the same between different versions of Word, Mac Word, Pages, Google doc etc.

I'm not saying .PDF formats are perfect, but they're certainly more consistently presented to the end user.

0 comments

lucb1e2y ago

> When I send someone a Word document, I can't guarantee that it will look the same

Exactly! Isn't that wonderful? People can view it on a desktop, a phone, a text-to-speech engine if they want to have it in audio form... it all just works because the tags are preserved that show what's supposed to be a heading, where new paragraphs start, whether text to the right is a side box or a continuation of the line, etc.

> certainly more consistently presented to the end user

   We all love horizontal scrolling to read your sentences, yes. Let's make everything preformatted text with a line length chosen by the sender. (Yes I know HN now inserts line breaks in code blocks now. Isn't it nice to have reflowed text?)

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse