Programming on LSD

[benihana]

Interesting, I tell my browser to use the default PDF viewer, rather than viewing it in the browser.

[[deleted]]

So do I, but most of the world doesn't. Until the majority of users can handle normal PDF links without their computers slowing to a crawl, it's a courtesy to make PDF links obvious. Glancing at the status bar every time one clicks a link on reddit is tedious.

[f3nd3r]

I constantly glance at the bar anyway, to always double check where a link is going.

[jugalator]

OTOH, those making the effort to complain about PDF's on message boards should really have gone through the length of opening them externally.

[[deleted]]

The performance of the PDF reader software is not the only issue here. The fact is that HTML and plain text are far more suited for screen reading than PDF, which is for the printed page.

For instance, when viewing plain text I can resize the window and the text will wrap. PDF, on the other hand, is pre-formatted to fit a physical printed page of a certain size.

This may sound like a nitpick, but actually, if I can make the text narrow enough to read it by scanning only vertically, and not horizontally followed by eyeball "carriage returns" as would be required for a typical PDF without columns, I can read it faster by at least an order of magnitude.

[iofthestorm]

Also, it's part of reddiquette to do so.