Web Publishing with PDF

I’ve been hearing that there is a general want to go to (X)HTML as a general format for many of these materials, and what I mean by hearing is phrases like “Take this brochure and post it on the Web” and “We would like these flyers posted in HTML”. One would think this would be a logical step. The content is great for the most part and much of it is written in such a way as to be already Web ready and most of it is the kind of thing our users (readers) would want to get from our site.

The problem lies, as it often does, in the formatting. The source files for this stuff is usually Word, Power Point or Pagemaker, or something equally not Web and converting these to HTML is a nightmare. On the other hand converting them to PDF is relatively easy. The question that keeps coming up in my mind is really, how much effort should we be spending taking materials and content that is designed at the source for print and converting that to something delivered on the Web?

I imagine this is a common problem. For my part, I think I have the answer. If there is a need to have this content on the Web, these documents should be designed for the Web at the source or in the case of say a tri-fold brochure with some good content, that content needs to be repurposed into a second, separate document. This puts the burden on the content creators, to be sure, but in the long run I think this has way more upside.

In this case the content creators would need to outline their goals for the content before the decision is made on how to publish it. If they want a piece to be printed and passed out in the clinics, well, PDF should work fine for now. If they want something for parents to read online, well then we go XTML. As always, the tool should come after the goal. If I could get people thinking Web first it would be much easier. I think there are ways to meet multiple goals with one tool (XHTML) but there needs to be a shift in mindset at the beginning of the process.

It takes me about 30 minutes to convert one of our flyers from the Word source into a valid XHTML document with semantic markup. This is mainly due to all the formatting (two columns, etc.) that is used to style these documents for print. If the source were plain text for instance, I could do this in just a few minutes and with the use of a print style sheet keep the formatting in tact for printing. In essence killing two birds with one stone. I’ve yet to convince anyone that this is a good idea.

Until that time I think that PDF is a fine way to publish this content. It makes my life easier and there is no extra effort needed on the part of the content creators. Just pass me the document and I’ll convert and push. I’ve done quite a bit of reading up on PDFs this week and so far I can’t find anything that has convinced me that PDFs aren’t a good solution. I am curious to hear if anyone else has an idea or some lessons learned on this subject.