> Although several in the past have commended us on our IC's PDF datasheets > (on our web site), we have one individual recently who insists that > PDF-format datasheets will be the downfall of mankind (no, I'm serious - the > guy has written many times complaining). Of course we offer to send a > printed version to him, but he actually just wants us to not use PDF > (stating that we and all other companies using PDF are "lazy")?!? > > He suggests we make our datasheets for online browsing - putting them in > HTML, with the 10-15 images per datasheet in .gif format (or such). > > I see that this certainly is not a common practice with many other > companies; I would like to know the opinions of my fellow PIC designers on > this matter - is PDF dreaded to you all? Would you use an HTML version of > the datasheets? Ok, as a long time net user (even before html), and sometime datasheet and catalog user, I really like paper for large or diverse documents. I have been using the web and pdf forms of the digikey catalog and finally ordered a paper copy. I have been using the pdf forms of the Microchip datasheets and find that I have to print them to really be happy. Why? With paper I can read it anywhere at full quality and resolution. Perhaps I am a Luddite, but even with the 21" monitor at work, or my 17" at home, very dense printed material is hard to deal with for a long period. I would not be tempted to try to read for example the pdf Digikey catalog on a laptop. Also, somehow paper supports what I will call "hardware store wandering" better. "hardware store wandering" is when you have got every thing you came for and just are wandering around in the store, looking at gizmos, free associating, having ideas, gee isn't that a neat thingy, maybe about what to do for the next project or sometime someday. Great source of creativity, possibly only surpassed by thinking in the shower. Or suppose you just want to understand a bit about a topic you don't know, say you are thinking, I have an application that might be right for fuzzy logic, but I know nothing about fuzzy logic. How do I find out enough about fuzzy logic to see if I want to invest in really learning it? So, what does this have to do with html vs pdf. PDF almost always seems to print much better than html. On the other hand, I probably print less than 5% of what I read and html lends itself to random or directed exploration really well. Just click here and there and see where you land. Like it? make a bookmark. Don't like it? go back, or follow the next link... If you could do this with pdf fine, but as far as I can tell, you have to decide that you want the whole darn 3.8 meg document, download it, fire up Acrobat, read it on the screen or print it. Depending on how fast your connection is and how overfull your machine is, it takes a few seconds or minutes. And then you discover that you weren't really interested in that specific thing out of the list of 600 application notes in pdf format that you could download. With html, you can see a few pages and decide not to download the rest. Or decide, "wow, thats just what I wanted, I wonder if there is a pdf I can download". On the other hand, I find large one piece html documents unwieldy too. The image quality and information density are definitly better with pdf. html does not seem like the right thing for a 388 page datasheet. Almost, but not quite. Perhaps pdf is not much better, but it does give you better viewing and especially print quality. Finally, I now have (in just one short week of looking around) over 40 .pdf files with names like: 21189a.pdf 30189d.pdf 30264a.pdf 30390e.pdf 40122b.pdf an515.pdf an520d.pdf an529.pdf an535.pdf an541.pdf an542.pdf an546.pdf an548.pdf an556.pdf an563.pdf an579.pdf an585.pdf an600.pdf an616.pdf Great, I've only had this stuff for three days and already I have no idea what it is. And pdf can't be searched with things like 'grep' either (unlike html) so to figure it out, I have to open each one and look at it individually. I'm really not going to enjoy this when I have something like a thousand of these things. Bottom line, html is easier to navigate, easier to search, more of an open standard, but is limited in formatting capability and compression. You might try Microchips idea that they use on their site, of giving you an html copy of the first page of a data sheet. Or make overviews of a larger pdf document. Perhaps having both is the best answer, or maybe set a threshold, say 20 pages for making pdf otherwise make html. I will say, if I ran into a site that had a big list of .pdf downloads and no immediately useful visible content, I would probably not bother with it unless I really needed something very specific and already knew exactly what. I have tried to keep ideology out of this and just present my impressions as a somewhat experienced user of both types of document. I hope this helps. -dg David Gould dg@illustra.com 510.869.6383 or 510.305.9468 Informix Software (formerly Illustra) 1111 Broadway #2000 Oakland, CA 94607 - I realize now that irony has no place in business communications.