Pogue Asks: Why Are PDFs Still in Portrait Orientation?

In today’s Pogue’s Posts Blog, Pogue repeats a question from one of his readers; “Why Are PDFs Still in Portrait Orientation?” It is a question tha t I have been asking for a while not, but one for which I offer a better solution: reflow is better than landscape.

Why Are PDFs Still in Portrait Orientation?

From today’s mailbag:

Hi Dave! Since you’ve been writing about pet peeves recently, here’s one of mine: Why are PDF documents still mostly in portrait instead of landscape orientation?

Be it eBooks, user guides for software, or anything else that is clearly intended to be viewed mainly on screen, it mostly comes in vertical orientation, requiring a lot of zooming in and out, plus some extra scrolling (if you don’t have one of those fancy pivot monitors, that is).

I suppose it’s mostly because programs like Word, InDesign, etc. initially come up with this page orientation because it’s what we’re used to; when it gets printed, it’s mostly in portrait mode. But… who prints that kind of stuff anymore? Most of the PDFs I read never end up on paper, so it would make sense if electronic documentation came in landscape orientation. Wouldn’t it?

Yes! I could not agree more. May the seeds of your idea find fertile hold in the minds of the world’s user-manual layout folk.

I think a better question is why Acrobat’s Reflow mode is not the default option. Reflow, as the name implies, allows PDF text to flow to automatically fit the width of the screen.

Another good question is why word processors, like Word and Open Office, do not open up by default to ‘zoom to page width’?

Both of these would take advantage of the large and wider screens more common today.

Tags: blogs, ebook, idea, layout, monitors, nyt, nytimes, open office, pdf, pogue, portrait, portrait mode

This entry was posted on March 30, 2009 at 3:02 pm and is filed under large print. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.