"VanguardLH" <***@nguard.LH> wrote
| Porn comes [as images embedded] in PDFs? I supposed that could happen.
Sorry. Over your head. It's known as a joke.
| Side-by-side comparisons have Adobe on top
| with others having lesser quality (even the one that I picked which is
| PDF-xchange). Some have some noticeable artifacts. Measures of
| readability do not account for quality in rendering. Here's a bruised
| apple but compared to another bruised apple this one looks the same.
| Well, then go have fun eating your bruised apples.
|
|
https://www.ghacks.net/2010/07/02/pdf-reader-rendering-quality-comparison-which-is-the-best/
|
I don't see it. That article looks glib, at best,
to me. And I don't agree with his conclusions.
Does he accept ads from Adobe, I wonder? Was
he desperate to come up with an idea for an article?
There's no shortage of glib articles making dubious
product comparisons for profit. Consumer Reports
is full of them. (Clean-up ratings for house paint?)
What I see is an article telling me that if I accept
the extreme bloat, security risk and probable spyware
of Acrobat Reader, I'll get a bolder, larger, default
text size. But that's adjustable, so what difference
does it make? And why is bolder necessarily better?
The author takes screenshots at 100%
and from that rates PDF readers. He starts out with
the question of whether PDF rendering varies. Does
he study close-ups of text at the same size? Does
he study layout differences or image rendering? No.
He just takes screenshots of heavily seriffed text in
different sizes.
By the end he's conflated that with overall product
quality. It's just a page full of fuzzy-headedness.
What about bloat, security and features
as factors? PDF XChange Viewer provides editing
functionality that most others don't. Doesn't that
count for something? No, implies our expert! How
about the security risk of the Adobe reader? Our expert
couldn't care less. For him, PDF reader quality is all
about how heavily seriffed text looks at 100% size.
What I see is a good example of what passes for
journalism online these days. Imagine paying $5 for
a computer magazine and reading that article. Do
you suppose you'd still come up with $5 next month
for a study of the dirt-resistance of pink iPhone
cases?
It might be interesting to see an analysis of
what goes on underneath. Are they all using the
same display window? Or does each interpret the
PDF code in its own way and paint the result to
the screen? Or something in between? I don't
know. But half-baked "scientific comparisons"
based on nothing much are not very informative.
In actual practice, I can't remember the last time
I actually did a lot of reading of a PDF. I sometimes
download things like magazine articles, but with those
I generally extract the text and read it in Notepad,
using Verdana. Why? Because serif text is difficult to
read on a screen. And dual columns on a page don't
work very well onscreen. PDF was designed to faithfully
convert between digital and print. In most cases, the
PDf as-is is mostly useful only for printing. TXT or HTML
are far better suited for reading onscreen.
If a PDF reader allowed me to change the font face
I'd regard that as a very important feature. But as
far as I know, none of them allow that. Why? Because
PDF is not a format for onscreen viewing. *It's a format
for the printing of images of printed works.*
If I want to write something like a manual I use
CHM format. And these days most browsers support
embedded images, base-64 encoded, up to something
like 100 KB. Which means that a single HTML file
could be used to produce things like hardware manuals
with diagrams that would be far more readable (and
editable) than PDF. If you have to read lots of PDF
text for your job then you have my sympathy. Most
of us don't do that. If I were you I'd consider finding
or writing a tool to convert them to HTML. Then you
could still pick your font size but have a more readable
font.