Free PDF Software:
When to use HTML Pages and When to use PDFs on Your Web Site
By Paul Kaufman
You have options when it comes to how you display your web pages. Many web sites on the Internet are created using HTML. Some pages, you will find, are Adobe Acrobat "PDF" files. These files have been converted to Adobe's proprietary format, but anyone can view them by down loading the free acrobat reader. This article focuses on when to use HTML and when to convert content to PDFs for display on your site.
When should you use HTML-based pages?
The answer is: almost always (unless you are using a dynamically generated site in which case some of the page is created by an automated process). But for those sites that are fairly static, most of your pages should be HTML. Why? Because that's what Internet browsers can display. It is the norm. There is no need for separate software to display HTML pages (like with PDFs). That is why most sites use it today
When should you use PDFs?
Only when required. The great thing about Adobe PDF format is that you can maintain the formatting and layout of your source document on the web without any effort. The software looks at the document and makes a PDF which looks exactly like it. No need to do any coding. So if you have a newsletter, for example, that has a multi-column format, the document would be time-consuming to convert to HTML. But with Adobe Acrobat, you just convert and bing-bang, you have the document ready to post on your web site. Of course, when you post this file on your site, you should always give folks a link to the free Adobe Acrobat reader (since they may not have it).
Why should you avoid making most or all of your web site pages in pdf? The simply answer is navigation. PDF files are just pages, they cannot have navigation to other pdf files or HTML files. It is also much easier to have your site built in HTML and use pdf for those pages which would take too long to convert to HTML or have complex formatting that would be difficult to replicate in HTML.
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