The author responds point by point but I'm afraid the responses are not convincing. McDaniels writes, for example, "your second article that has mentioned excessive crashing, with no link to a study or evidence to support it." Though I have not actually counted the times it has happened to me, I can personally attest to the number of crashes. My favorite is the Adobe 'update' alert box, which inexplicably shows up behind the Reader when it is launched from a web browser. The alert box, of course, locks up both the browser and the reader, but there is no way to get at it to click "No, I don't want to update, please go away." McDaniels also talks a lot about how "PDF's can be displayed Full-screen in a browser to hide the Adobe reader interface." Quite right. But none of the browser's controls work on a PDF file, and now the only controls that do work (however cumbersome) are all hidden. That the Reader uses tiny fonts, writes McDaniels, is the author's fault, since the author sets the font size, and anyway, "Acrobat has the ability to zoom into areas of a document for easier readin." But have you used this feature? The document is now many times wider than the screen, which means constant left-to-right scrolling (using the little hand, because the scroll bars don't work properly, and because the mouse wheel is, of course, now useless). And while McDaniels argues that the size of a PDF file "is determined by the author," he completely glosses over the fact that the exact same text creates a PDF file a gazillion times larger than the corresponding HTML. I am totally behind Nielsen on this one. Totally.
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