The Year 2025 and the PDF

I’m currently enmeshed in a large project requiring me to hit “rewind” and look back for citations and revisit links. A surprising number of sources are gone, and an alarming number of links lead nowhere — except, in a lot of cases, to a stubborn, unyielding, and time-honored little PDF, hunkered down on a server somewhere, resisting the vicissitudes of time.

I’m beginning to think that one of the best things digital technology has given us is the PDF. I can make PDFs of articles, slideshows, or images, and share them with confidence. They print great, when that’s needed. And they endure despite people wanting to move on and leave them behind.

Even in the face of repeated denigration — they’re a vestige of print, they are a clumsy format, they can’t be reformatted — they stand tall. “Print” was more than paper — it was a set of design principles instantiated in paper, and those design principles still generally hold well. Clumsy? How about “tough to kill,” an important factor these days, when clowns bent on censorship are on the loose. And as for being reformatted, that’s pretty low on the list of what matters to most users.

In any event, this is just a short post to celebrate something that outlasted Flash, Clippy, SGML, and a host of other approaches to formatting, interrogating, or presenting content.

PDF, I have a newfound respect for you, my enduring, humble friend, lo these many years . . .

Unsolicited advice to the media: Please stop telling us which President appointed that judge. It only contributes to the sense that everyone is biased, and nobody can serve the law without prejudice.