As my summer holiday started I found myself with the urge to promote the document preparation system LaTeX. But during drafting a post about it (which soon grew in my mind to a whole series of posts) I realized that all this work would be almost completely uninteresting to the majority of the people on the Internet since the majority runs Windows, and although LaTeX can produce other formats than pdf, these other formats are mostly irrelevant to the average Windows user.
The pdf format on the other hand, although not overly liked by the average Windows user, is at least a format that is well-known and available even to the most green of computer users.
So before I set out on my LaTeX promotion crusade I have to promote the portable document format.
I know why I didn’t like pdf before, and I am sure that the very same reason, or a permutation of it, is why people still doesn’t like pdf.
- Why another frickin’ format? We already have Microsoft Word’s .doc, isn’t that enough?!
- Building on the first point, this means one more program (Adobe Reader or whatever other pdf viewer you use) to install and keep up to date
- It is sooo fun having your browser freeze up for a second or two every time you click on a link at a homepage, which turns out to be a pdf file
I felt all of this before, so what has changed?
First of all I started building web-pages. I wanted to be good at it, so I did my research, I went to the bottom with this fixation of linking to pdf files.
My first question was “Why not just link to another web page?”
The answer to this question was rather simple. Different web-browsers render the content in their own way. There is no way to achieve consistency, not to mention that it all to some extent also depends on whatever features the user has activated in his/her browser (Javascript and/or CSS may be turned off, as well as images)
Also, the very same thing applies should a user want to print the content. Since the browsers render the pages in their own way, the printed copy will reflect this.
“Great” I thought, “then why not link it to a Word document?”
This is where different systems enter the picture. I admit, many of these examples are more or less moot today, but back then they were very much a factor to consider. GNU/Linux does not have the Office suite, and as such have (had) no way of reading Word documents. Today this has somewhat been mitigated by the advent of projects like OpenOffice.org which more or less reliably can open and correctly render Microsoft Word documents.
But back then, and also today, not all systems can reliably read Word documents. Also, opening Word documents found on the Internet (at least if you are running Windows) is almost akin to begging to have your computer infected by viruses.
So clearly none of these two seemingly good alternatives would work. But there was still that small matter of creating pdf files. For that you needed Adobe Acrobat (the full program, not the Reader) and that cost money.
Of course, back then I didn’t have anything to put in a potential pdf file anyway, which I couldn’t readily present with html, so it mattered not.
Another thing that changed recently, but all the same made my views towards pdf even more positive, was that I myself changed operating system, from Windows to GNU/Linux.
This brought two things into my life. The lesser of the two was that I could no longer rely on the Word .doc format.
And the more important aspect, I began appreciating free and open source software (FOSS). This second aspect made me forcefully reject the .doc format from my life as best I could (not easy when the majority of the world uses it) but luckily I am still studying, and in this world of academia students come from different situations, have different backgrounds, experience, and run different systems. Most run Windows, some run GNU/Linux, and one or two run Mac.
It makes for a rather diverse environment. Which in turn means that the teachers/examiners must either be able to read every single format that each of these systems can produce (or at least a subset based on the most widely popular document format for each individual system) or require of the students to hand in each assignment and report in a standard format which exists across all (or at least most) systems.
Our teachers doesn’t do any of this, or rather, they adjust for the Windows crowd, and feel safe in the fact that the Mac and GNU/Linux crowd will behave. And of course we do. Since we can only reliably say that the teachers will have the ability to read documents from Windows users, we either have to produce Windows documents ourselves, or some document that can be read on a Windows system, which we can produce. PDF solves that.
In fact, I need not worry what system the teacher is on, because I can rest assured that my pdf will be readable. I can simply care less what system they are operating. Windows? Pdf works! Mac? Pdf Works! GNU/Linux? Pdf works! You start to see a trend here? 
And not only can they open and view the reports, it will actually look to them exactly as it looked to me when I reviewed the document before submission. Whatever settings they have, the margins won’t be changed (in turn changing the entire flow of the document and re-arranging graphics etc.)
Also, since pdf nowadays is an open standard, and aspiring to become ISO certified, from a libertarian perspective this is also great. Sure, Adobe is the “owner” of the technology, but this is still less of a vendor lock-in than say, using Microsoft Word and their proprietary formats.
The one drawback with pdf files is that you need some sort of editing software to have any hope of modifying them. These usually cost money.
But then again, this is where LaTeX comes into play…
