I hate pdfs. I hate their all-pervasive dominance of online documentation. I hate their corporate over-functionality. I hate the way they hijack my desktop and interrupt whatever I'm doing. But most of all I hate their resource-hungry slowness. Bloody pdfs.
I hate pdfs. The three letters p d f strike fear into my web-based heart. Do I dare risk opening this document with Adobe's evil Acrobat Reader? I know what'll happen. My browser will momentarily halt, and the dreaded Windows hourglass will appear. Up at the top of the screen will come the dreaded words "Not responding" while Adobe's bloated software impregnates my operating system. I bet it's checking for updates, even though I don't want bloody updates. I don't want the additional ability to read Icelandic script out loud or whatever pointless extras it's trying to load. Every other process on my computer will halt - that mp3 will stop playing, that YouTube video will stop downloading, and my online connection will get the hiccups. I could go and make a cup of tea while this stuff churns through. Bloody pdfs.
I hate pdfs. I'd be quite happy with a simple document reader but no, Adobe wants to force upon me some fat multi-tasking beast. I've tried shifting some unnecessary additional files, embedded deep within the heart of the program, but Acrobat Reader still loads at the speed of an arthritic tortoise. I want fewer features, not more, but that's not an option. I don't want extra icons added to my toolbars, I don't want 30 megabytes of bloatware chundering away in the background, and I don't want pointless program components destabilising my operating system. Invariably, if my laptop ever grinds to a halt and requires rebooting, it's an Adobe process that's buggering everything up. Bloody pdfs.
I love pdfs. The ability to duplicate any document in a simple cross-platform format, that's brilliant. Every typeface nuance, every scalable layout, every intricate diagram, all available to be viewed, printed and saved. No need to obtain a paper version, just a perfect digital copy. OK, so the cut-and-paste option for text is positively archaic and impractical. OK, so I can't lift individual images and jpegs out of the frozen imprint. But it's a damned clever way to save and store publications for posterity. Hurrah for pdfs.
I hate pdfs. I hate that sense of unheralded despair when I click on a weblink only discover that I've clicked on a pdf, and the dawning realisation that my laptop will be unusable for the next minute. I hate the way that lazy organisations bung pdfs onto their websites without extracting the information into a simpler HTML format. I hate that even alternative pdf-reading software (Foxit Reader, anyone?) still materialises everything at snail-speed. Surely, in the 21st century, humankind must have come up with a better more efficient way of reading online documents than cutting-edge 1993 technology? Bloody pdfs. [Not responding]
