The PR Company's Love Affair with the PDF

Technology is great, many years ago the desk top publishing revolution was spurred on by the likes of the Apple Macintosh, Adobe's Postcript format and Aldus Pagemaker. Of course I am over-simplifying everything, but at least the first two offered something new which these days we all take for granted. Apple gave us the mainstream usable computer, before which a clunky interface was way beyond acceptable, and Adobe introduced the idea that a document on one computer could be printed to almost any printer and actually look how you intended, was a fantasy.

Those not comfortable with geekyness, skip the next three paragraphs.

Back then, a WIMP interface was something reasonably new, today most people would have to google the acronym to find out what it even means. Likewise CLI was common place, especially when it came to moving files around. Again most people will find themselves googling that one too.

And before Windows introduced us to the GDI printer, which for the non geeky amongst you simply means, "my computer will work out where every single dot should appear, and it'll tell the poor dumb printer in nice strips as it sees fit," there were pretty much two clear camps of lasers. There were incredibly expensive postscript printers, and then there were less expensive proprietary printers that had their own software which only worked on certain systems. Often a dedicated computer would be connected to these, sit on a network, and become what was known as a RIP. Another for googling. :p

I guess you could say there was a third camp, the dot matrix, but let's not get into that now. Although I do find it interesting how software managed to create bold fonts from these early monsters, which at the time made daisy wheels look primitive. Oh how technology has advanced.

The scared technophobes and other dis-interesteds are safe to start reading again now!

What Postscript did for printers was provide a standard, a description of a page that would work with any printer compatible with the language. And yes, Postscript is an actual computer language. In the early 90s, Adobe realised that there was another direction to take Postscript, as a way of making sure that documents not only print to many different brands of printers and come out roughly the same, but also appear on many different display devices.

And so PDF was born, and these days it is an excellent mature and now an officially open standard that anybody can use without forking out cash to Adobe for the privilege. Cue bad joke involving a UK insurance company. And this is becoming a problem when it comes to PR material, PDF being so great that is, not bad jokes involving insurance companies, although perhaps they are too rampant as well.

You see what PDF was designed to do, it does very well. PDF was designed as a way of presenting a document on multiple computers, and devices, from printouts to computer screens, mobile phones to kiosk displays, and presenting it so that it looks as close to the original as possible. But this isn't the same thing as providing a genuinely portable document that can be of use at the other end for purposes other than just looking at them.

I loosely consider myself a journalist, I've written reviews, articles, posted news pieces, and otherwise shared opinions in a published form. Albeit on the internet, which admittedly anyone can do, but most of this has all been for the online magazine DVD Reviewer, and subsequently MyReviewer.com, rather than forum posts or a personal blog.

One of the most pointless things the odd PR company would do for the odd campaign, is send us a fancy pretty flyer, entirely existing as a graphical image, usually a JPEG. All you can do as a journalist when presented with such information is think, "that's nice dear." They rarely contain any information, most of it is graphical, and none of it is reproducible in any shape or form.

When you are snowed under, which is most of the time, or just feeling lazy, which is to be fair when it comes to journalists, also most of the time, and you have an option between covering something requiring little work or something demanding a lot, you go for the easy. When something is sent to you in an easily readable Word document that you can cut and paste, of course with a bit of quick editing, into something printable that others might be interested in, you are going to do that over the alternative.

Especially if that alternative involves typing out every single word, trying to get some sort of usable image out of the graphical flyer, then realising that just isn't going to happen, and scrapping the whole thing because most people don't want to read a wall of text that isn't decorated at least a little with something pretty.

And so I finally get to the point, PR companies using PDFs. You know what, yes some of them look nicely produced, even though most of them really just look like you've printed the Word document you could have sent to a PDF generator. But very little of any of them are useful, because they generate more work than they solve.

You see when you cut
and paste a paragraph
from a PDF what you
get is a load of hard
line breaks at the end
of every line, which
require you to manually
edit every single
sodding one out, and
that is a lot of work
which always ends up in
you missing one.

Not to mention, you lose all formatting when pasting into web pages and most editors. So yes, whilst they are marginally less hassle to deal with than being sent a JPEG of a flyer for some Anime title, if a journalist has the option of dealing with your product info all sent over as a swanky looking PDF, or someone else's that arrived as a Word document, congratulations you are going to lose.

This Week's Videos

This week's videos are closely related. First up is a fake supposed rare unreleased game for the NES or the SNES, it really doesn't matter which. It takes the idea of annoying platform level design and turns it into a wonderful piece of comedy that grows as it progresses to a wonderful climax.



Joining the above is a genuine video, of someone trying to play through a level or two of Kaizo Mario World, which is a hacked version of Super Mario World. The designer has created what is possibly the most annoyingly hard version of the game possible, in which you regularly die over and over again.

A quick google should find a torrent with the original Kaizo game roms suitable for most emulators.