Stop Using PDFs

(00:00) Where are your PDFs right now? Oh I have a giant file, I print them all out. Oh you do print them all out. Yeah, I print out all the PDFs and then I put them in a filing cabinet. So I've got like 5 or 6 filing cabinets just filled with pdfs. Yeah, yeah. And the there. I can’t go find anything... The forests thank you.

(00:18) Yeah. Welcome to the marketing team at one podcast where we have conversations about the issues one person marketing teams face when trying to meet their goals with limited time and budgets. Now here's your host, Eric and Mike. What’s going on Mike? Hold on, hold on. It's an important message from my kids school, and they put it in a PDF, and it's just annoying.

(01:02) I'm trying to read it, and it's maddening. And what's maddening? This communication or the fact that it's a PDF? PDF! Ahhh... I think people reach for PDFs way too quickly, it's problem. I think PDFs are wonderful. You can send them to print. They're very flexible. Every computer program can produce a PDF.

(01:24) I don't see what the problem is. I think they’re wonderful. How many of those PDFs that get created in the world actually end up being printed? Oh, yeah.... that part. Right? Like I don't think there's a lot of them. I mean, I think it's a small percentage. Yes. I will fully admit that PDF is a wonderful format.

(01:44) Like they've they really nailed something. But I think we're at a point in our digital maturity out in the world, right? That that like there are better ways and I don't think we should just default to putting something in a PDF. A great example. Like, like my kid's school, they send out this, this newsletter and I'm going to throw them under the bus, it's an easy, an easy target right? Right now.

(02:09) But they sent and I know what I know why it happens. Right. But they send out this PDF it's designed for 8.5 x 11 And they've got a bunch of text on there and they're and it's a it's a weekly newsletter. It's very important for the parents to read that. look through all the different things that are coming up.

(02:28) Where are things they need to know? Oh, is a it's a spirit wear day later this week, you know, come and come dressed up as a soccer mom or something like that. Right. That's important stuff that people need to know. Right? But on a phone.... But when you're in, I mean, yes, I've got a small phone.

(02:43) I prefer a small phone, but. Still. Like to be able to read it. The experience of reading one line of text is just super annoying because you've got to zoom in, try and read it, and you have to make sure that you zoom to the right level. Have you ever tried to read a line of text that you've have to scroll and then scroll back to.

(03:02) You, just turn your phone on or, well. Who does that? I can’t do that either. It's annoying. Extra level. So I it's like, I know why it happens because there's, there's not an awareness of tool, other tools that could do it, or maybe they just don't have the tools at their disposable or it's just really darn easy.

(03:18) Like you said, every software out there can create a PDF. There's no barrier to entry to create this thing and share it with people. I get it, I mean, but I think there's just I've seen some just horrible misuse of PDFs over the years and like. So, the the bulk of what you're crying about today is the fact that PDFs are just the default that everybody goes to because it's easiest and everybody can read it, and that's no problem.

(03:48) But the idea is that we need to maybe think about use case. I don't think people and it's understandable. I think people are just trying to get their job done. But I don't think they're really thinking about the end use of what this thing that they're creating. I could talk about horror stories.

(04:06) Right. Like there's I know of a couple that are pretty bad in some. The one case which is really interesting to me is that, it's an alert that needs to go out to let people know that their way of life is going to be changed because of a, a detour on a street or something like that. Right now, most people are going to be receiving that on their phone, right? Like most likely.

(04:31) Right? So this thing is formatted this time it's not 8.5” by 11” portrait, It's landscape. Right? Mmmm...Nice And it's and there's an alert telling people what to be had. Construction is happening. Here's where it's happening. Everything. It gets delivered to their phone and the formatting of it all is intended as if you're holding up an 8.

(04:54) 5” by 11” sheet that you can kind of do this with, right? So that happens on a regular basis every time there's an alert that needs to go out, it's sent as a PDF. And people are notified to click on this link to go to a PDF, download a PDF to find the information that needs to be there. And this happens all the time. So ideally you need to print that out from your phone to be able to...

(05:16) No nobody's printing it. Nobody's printing this thing. It's like that's the thing. Like I think PDF was intended a long time ago to have this, like, you could design this thing and you could share it with you, and there would be fidelity over what I designed in. I could send it to you and you could use it and like that.

(05:34) That's why it's so great. But now I think we've lost sight of the original purpose and how it's it's kind of. Well, and it's maybe a relic of that era when everybody did print out. It's like I remember, you know, maybe visiting a family member that was a slightly older generation.

(05:52) and, I think it was actually a funny Geico commercial where the guy goes into a filing cabinet. He's like, here, I printed all this stuff out of the internet. Which happens all the time too still, right? Yeah, nobody does that anymore. I realize this is a kind of contrarian view. Like, there's a lot of people that, you know, if they don't see anything wrong with it, you know, like printing the internet Yeah! I love that....or, you know, or like downloading a PDF for things.

(06:20) But like, there's a I think a lot of it just comes down to like usability type things. And thinking about the usability of a PDF. the other horror story I could share is that we have this is a client we had way back. It was an archive of linked things that were available on their website. It was a list of these resources that are available, and they didn't have this information on a page on their website.

(06:43) They created a PDF of this and then linked directly to the files that are on their website. So that's fine. But you know what happened? The they had to change servers and the links for every one of those that those resources changed. And so we had to go back into the PDF. Edit I'm talking about hundreds of URLs, in a PDF to link to where the new location of these files are.

(07:18) And because PDFs kind of can live in archives anywhere, we had to work really hard to find other copies of this PDF that existed so we could remove it so people didn't get sent to the link like it was like a that's a gross misuse of PDF. Like - jailable offense type thing. There should be authorities called.

(07:45) Yeah, yeah. So I mean I've seen these like misuse things. And so I just got over over time. I'm just kind of build this case of like, you know what else with PDFs? Like what what happens with PDFs and how they're used today? Right. where does a PDF file most of the time go after it's been viewed.

(08:08) Where do your where are your PDFs right now? Oh, I have a giant file, I print them all out. Oh you do print them out? Yeah, I print out. all the PDFs. And then I put them in a filing cabinet. So I've got like 5 or 6 filing cabinets just filled with pdfs Yeah, yeah...that I printed out. They’re there. Yeah. I can’t go find anything out of it... The forests thank you.

(08:25) Yeah. No I okay I mean like. That’s dark Mike. Yes, you make a good point I mean PDFs portable document format. Isn’t that what pdf stands for? Yep. Yep. So the portable side of this is basically it's Achilles heel. It's too portable. if I look at my usage of PDFs in day to day things like some things are only available in PDFs, that's fine.

(08:48) What do you do with PDFs? Oh, you know where they are? Yeah. Where? They're in a folder on my computer taking up space and I don't even know they're there anymore. I would say the 90% of the PDFs that are on my computer right now are just taking up storage space and never to be found again, because it was something that probably would have been better just as a web page up on a website to for me to consume the information.

(09:12) But for for reasons it was done as a PDF instead of like created as a web page. That's where most PDFs go. I have some that I, that, I mean, I'm not going to lie, there are some that are valuable. There are some examples of PDFs that are really good, but I think most of those is because they are replicating, to your point, something that you might want to print out, it's more like a worksheet type thing that you can work through or fill in, fill in things for your own use.

(09:41) But that's a slippery slope. Because don't even get me started on form PDF forms. Yeah. Don't get me started. Give me an example of what you've seen as a PDF form first? Okay. Let's say. So I think for a long time the well, hey, let's digitize our records. We've got this, this form, or we need to collect information from somebody and then take that information and do something with it.

(10:05) Right. In one of the easiest ways to do that was like to scan the forms you already had and make some fields live and everything, but I, I don't know, I could be wrong. Do people enjoy filling out those PDF forms? Well, you know, it's like when you go get your new driver's license. That's pretty fun.

(10:22) I mean that experience is always wonderful. I just I don't know that the experience for filling out PDF forms is ideal either from a, from both the person filling them out and the people who have to deal with them after the fact. Well, don't those forms then enter into some sort of a system that then strips out all that data and puts it into a table or a database or something like that? Or is that a hard process for a pdf? I'm, I am assuming there are some big companies who have big, expensive workflows that can do that.

(10:55) But for most, like day to day use of most people that I see using it, it's no, it's that that PDF, the data for that PDF is locked into that PDF and then is manually extracted by copying and pasting into something gross. Right? I'm just yeah. I’m wretching... So that's what I'm saying. Even the people who are submitting the form or not submitting form, people who are putting the form out there are creating more work for themselves later when they get it back.

(11:27) But then if you think about the people who have to fill out this form, they go to a website and they click on a PDF thing. And don't even get me started on how different browsers handle PDFs differently, whether they download them or they show them. Right. There's a inconsistency there. You don't know what to expect from a PDF there, right? But let's say it's downloaded.

(11:47) You know that you need to download this thing. So you have a copy of that PDF on your computer somewhere, and then you fill out the form and then - do you save over it? Do you rename it? Do you, right? Where do you make a copy of that. Right? Anytime I filled these things out, I have two copies of essentially the same form, the blank one and the one I filled out.

(12:09) That's good. I do the same thing so we are on the same tack. Right? But then so then I take my thing, and most of the time it's not that you're, well, sometimes you're uploading it to somewhere, but other times you're emailing it to somebody. Your emailing it, exactly. So somebody you're emailing this giant PDF thing with all your data in there that then they have to take and put into some storage thing somewhere.

(12:32) it's a nuisance, especially when there's like 50 jillion different form builders out there that you can grab all the information, have it put stored nicely into a spreadsheet that you can actually do something with afterwards without having to copy and paste and all that. So that's a whole different category of PDFs that are evil.

(12:53) Yeah. Yep. Okay. So there's the forms that are evil. Yep. There's just basic communications. Yeah. PDFs that are alerts that somehow probably originated with the intent of I'm going to have to print this out and tape it to the door. Or put it up on the bulletin board for everybody in the office to see.

(13:12) But 90% of the audience gets it on their phone and they’re pinching and zooming Yeah. Driving themselves nuts because I can't see anything built on that. Yeah. Those are two terrible uses for pdfs. Yep. Any more examples of that? What else is terrible? Well not checking to see what, like your file size is for this thing.

(13:32) If it's meant to be transported and it's not going to be printed all the time you're putting a big onus on people. I think another huge downside, especially if PDFs are a key strategy for you publishing information on the internet. There's some serious concerns there, right? Like we've already talked about the mobile experience and everthing like that, but like, you can't like embed analytics on a, on a PDF, right? You don't know if anybody's actually reading them.

(13:58) You don't know how many pages in they're reading it. You don't know if that content's being you can tell that someone's downloaded the PDF but you don't like it, right? Whereas like if that was a web page, you could see that, oh, hey, they spent five minutes reading this thing. The average user spends five minutes reading this thing.

(14:14) Oh, this must be pretty valuable. Like people are getting a lot of they're getting some depth out of this. That's valuable information you'd want to have. I think if you've got a website and you should have your analytics hooked up to just so you have a general idea of what's going on in everything, right? in a lot of a lot of people, we work with their average users it's like 70 to 80% of people are using a mobile phone to browse the website.

(14:42) Wow, OK. Right? So think about a fixed size PDF and the experience that you're giving people when they're on their phones. Yeah. And how often have I taken a PDF that's been downloaded onto my phone and done something with it, like sent it to another format or printed it myself? It doesn’t happen. Yeah.

(15:04) And the things I really care about. I'm, I actually I, I probably am sending it somewhere else. Like I might be browsing it and then sending it to my desktop so I can actually read it. So I mean, that's a concern. The other thing is just, accessibility, right? Accessibility concerns on anything you're putting out on the website.

(15:22) Like, can people read it? Can it does it can screen reading technology take advantage of these things? Right. And so, most people who are creating PDFs aren't thinking with accessibility in mind. And that's fine. That's not part of the job. But it well, it could be part of your job, depending on if you're in a government agency, you absolutely are thinking about it.

(15:40) but... And if a majority of your content that's valuable that people are going to on your website is not accessible or up to those accessibility standards, you've got problems. I mean, when we do those kind of audits, that's a big part of it is you can do the whole website for accessibility.

(15:57) Great. Taken care of. There's a lot of great tools for that. That makes it pretty easy to do in comparison to PDF. PDFs can be tricky. You have to do it for the PDFs that we post on those sites. And that's where the real effort lies. Yeah, is to make those accessible. Yep. and readable, and all the things that go with.

(16:18) Those are not easy and that just doesn't happen automatically even in a pdf. No. I mean and acrobat can do some things to kind of help you, but it's still not a it's and that's a whole other I mean we could making accessible PDFs could be a multi-part series. I think for this podcast. People build careers around that. Yeah.

(16:36) I'm not all pessimistic about it. I think it's just like, kind of challenging the default that people will just run to Canva and create something and save it out as a PDF. It just like there there might be a better way to do that. Do we want to talk next about what are some of the more positive uses for a pdf? I mean, there is a use for them.

(17:01) You're not totally against all pdfs obviously. Yeah. Its never cut and dry like that. because there is value in a good solid pdf. Yeah. But what what would you say is a good use case for. You're going to make this going to be this is going to be tough. Do I need to watch out for any like sharp blades or like maybe a...

(17:19) or karate move? First and foremost, is this something that you intend to have have it be printed? Yes. If you need it to be printed and you want it to look the same as you've designed it? Absolutely. So like if you're distributing a flier that you want someone else to print and put up places, or you want, I don't think there's a better alternative.

(17:39) Okay. does it make sense to create something that, you know is printed? Let's say you're doing sale sheets or something that's going to be going to a conference, right? Does it make sense to, create that sale sheet, print it all out, and then do it in a completely different format for the web? Sometimes it doesn't. It might not.

(17:59) I mean, I would probably challenge a little bit like that Any copy on your website or any copy on a PDF that you're putting as a sale sheet should be on a web page. But, I mean, we see a lot where people like repurpose, like if you're repurposing something you've already printed and you want to make it available and you think that somebody is likely to try and print that out, then yeah, that's a great, great use for it too.

(18:25) Is there a process that makes it easy for people to have something. I think of the challenges you outlined with the alert system. That alert system was built around end-product being a PDF gets emailed out. That’s the end product. Yeah. Yep. Is that - right now that's just the easiest for that system, I guess.

(18:45) Yeah. Is it - Are there tools is something that's really challenging to do both? Like we're going to send out an email but read it here inside the email as text and the email first. And if you want to download it and print it, or whatever... I think it really depends on the content in this case. Right? Like in the case I'm thinking of, what they're really trying to do - it's a very templated thing.

(19:11) It but it does have a little bit of branding to it. But it's not it's not overly designed. There's not a lot of like graphics or anything like that. And I think that's a misuse of the of that where like if you could fire up your email provider of choice and create a custom template where you've got you've got your branding in there, you're, you're still keeping true to that, but it's in plain text.

(19:34) The content of that thing should just be there. I don't think you should be linking to a PDF at all in that case. Because the text is way more portable and and can flex to the different places, you know? Adaptable to where you are looking at it. Yeah. Yeah. With any of these things, it just really depends about the use case and, and weighing the benefits and everything.

(19:54) Right? Like you know, said before like forms, I hate forms, but I mean, there are valid, valid forms that you would want to have in there, right? Like shoot contracts, getting them signed. I mean, there's a lot of things, I think there's a shift going on away from PDFs for that too, like DocuSign and all these things.

(20:13) Those still do have that kind of 8.5 by 11 format, but that's more because it's it solidifies these like contracts and signatures. And you can get that happening way quicker than trying to meet somewhere and sign things and - Legal agreements things, yeah. like that, of course, you know, you could also review them and have to read them. Yeah. Almost forces you to print them out and sit down and read them.

(20:38) You should do anyway. But I mean I, I also see those kind of over here. Like I think most of the stuff we're talking about is like marketing and communications type uses of them, you know. I don't know, I think, if you have something that's really visual, like really design heavy, in that needs to be shared back and forth.

(20:55) I that that's. Yeah, thats the scenario I was thinking I was like, when we do proofing for big projects, and there are printed materials or something. Yep. You would have to send them out because like you asked at the beginning, is it being printed? Yes. Yeah. If it is, then you need to proof it. Do all of your review back and forth.

(21:13) Adobe makes a great tool for that, that you can have it all online and do it so you're not downloading a bunch of files and people can, you know, add in their comments all at the same. There's one - what do you say? There's all about one. One source of truth for everything. Yeah. So that's what's nice about that version of a pdf Totally.

(21:32) When you're doing print production and sending stuff to print But yeah - Legal contracts. Great. What other scenarios? That I recommend to use a PDF for? I mean, the the list is getting shorter and shorter by the by the year, so. As we are sitting here, I think... Yeah. Yep. It's time to clean up PDFs.

(21:51) Some people might not have the flexibility to choose some, some things, I think a lot of digital tools have come a long way. Let's use the alert example that we used before, right? Like there's MailChimp, HubSpot, Activecampaign, ConvertKit. Every one of the email service provider things, they've got really mature design tools where you can design that notification in an email that can be sent to people as they as they need to see it.

(22:23) And you can and it can be branded and it can be flexible in, in a format that people. Easy to read and... yada yada. Yep. Yeah. So I mean there's there's flexibility in there. I think web tools like for building web pages and stuff like that have matured incredibly. Right. If you really if you want to do something that's a little bit more design forward and, that you might used in a PDF before, just consider some of these, some of the newer tools, you may be hamstrung.

(22:52) You may have a CMS out there that won't allow you to do that, but know there are things out there that allow more of that creative freedom to mix and match things, along with the flexibility to. So when somebody is viewing it on their phone, they can actually read what you're putting out there.

(23:10) So CMS. Mike, what is CMS stand for? content management system. It's so most of the internet is built on WordPress or other CMS products, WordPress being the most popular of them. Which allows anyone to get into the back end and change content on a minimal level. Yeah. And customize it on the fly, as it were.

(23:29) Yeah, and a lot of them are kind of fixed on, you know, you have some fields, you can put stuff in there, you can match this to a template and and they can be confining. But I think a lot of CMSs are kind of getting outside of that. And you might have some more leeway. I mean, or if you have web developers you can work with like talk with them, like say, hey, this is a thing that I'm using for PDFs all the time.

(23:53) I guarantee you most web developers will look at that and go, yes, I can save the world from the PDF problem that we've got. Let's figure out a solution to this. Like, and we can change our workflow and probably make it a little, a little bit easier and work for the end user a lot better too. Again, making the world a better place. Yep.

(24:13) one less pdf at a time. Correct. Yeah. Let's talk about CRM because you've mentioned I just want to reiterate what CRM means because you've mentioned Constant Contact, Mailchimp... Oh yeah. Those are all CRMs? With with varying degrees of things. Right. it's a customer relationship management thing.

(24:31) And so what's what's happened over time is that it used to be like MailChimp and Constant Contact. They were just for email marketing. Then you had over here you had like Salesforce and these other like big like sales focused things where they want to keep track of the contact and what activity they've had.

(24:53) And then a while ago, they, the chocolate and the peanut butter started getting together on things like. And so a lot of these providers and like MailChimp has been going over this for many years where they're putting a lot more focus on the customers and everything, because they've seen that you can have a more effective sales team if they have information about what marketing activities, including email, have been in there.

(25:20) HubSpot does this great. They've got the whole their whole ecosystem is built around this handshake between marketing activities and sales activities. And the glue that puts that all together is their CRM. That makes sense, CRM. okay. Yeah. So let's get back to other, alternatives then. You so put it all in an email so that it's expandable and it fits on your phone and you can read it and consume it.

(25:42) Yeah. What other alternatives are there to pdfs? I think, the website like looking at your website and looking at the flexibility of your website, and can you do the things that you need to with that? Is there a PDF you're sending out regularly? Like, is there a thing that you're sending out as a PDF weekly, monthly or something like that? That might be the first place to look at and go, you know what, maybe there's a better workflow that we can have on our website because you can tackle that problem yourself.

(26:10) Or you can get your get your development team involved in it. And, and hey, we have this weekly newsletter that we send to our parents, and they're having a heck of a time getting through this. We would just love to have a way where they can read it on their phones, and then they can go back in time and look at other other newsletters.

(26:30) like that seems very possible on the web. Is the flow then, they still get an email, but it's a link. Click here. Yeah. Boom, it goes right back to that section of a website. Yeah. That has that updated content in a flexible format that works on a phone. Yeah. Or to it. And there's a couple different I've seen different strategies for that.

(26:49) Maybe your newsletter is just a collection of things. Yeah. Your email newsletter is a collection of things that exist elsewhere. So it's like a little snippet of like, hey, here's the things that you should be interested in. Or there's the other way where you're creating the newsletter as like, almost like a blog post somewhere on your site, and then your email says, hey, don't miss all the important stuff that's going on this week.

(27:12) Here's some highlights if you want to get the details, click here. And you go over to. Maybe this is, outside the bounds of this conversation, but is there a limit? What's wrong with just putting all that content? Let's say it's 2000 words in an email. Is that too much content for an email? What are the standards for people? B

(27:34) ecause you said the highlights is good, but... I don't That's a great question. I don't know. I'm gonna throw it back to you. Do you read long emails? You know, it's the scrolling that I that naturally comes with when you're reading comments on LinkedIn or you're reading comments on Reddit. Yeah. Or whatever it is. It's almost like we're used to the format so it doesn't annoy me as much now, but I maybe it was annoying a few years ago, I don't know. It seems not too bad.

(28:00) That it feels like a it would be an interesting test to see how you know. And that's another advantage. That's it goes back to the analytics thing. Right. Like being able to like email programs will let you know if people have opened it or if they've clicked through. So you can you can get some data about how people are using the email format.

(28:21) And I don't think you're going to get to the it's all like on a web page. You can say you get heatmaps of where everybody's going and how far down they're they're scrolling on the page and everything. You won't get that on the email. but so it'd be hard to test that little bit.

(28:37) Maybe thats the good argument for just putting the highlights in the email. Then you can capture analytics on the page itself. Oh yeah. Like you couldn't do on an email. You can get some analytics, like you said, but you can't. get the end up stuff from a page. I mean I realize it's hard a lot of people like the these this especially this conversation, they're not thinking about.

(28:56) They're just trying to check a box and move on to the next thing. They're trying to notify people. They're trying to do the right thing. But I don't know if we can get if I can change 1 or 2 schools to consider not putting it in a PDF, I feel like I’ve won. I think, you know, I don't want to pile on, but I think I get the same thing from my the schools that we get emails from, lets just say.

(29:21) Yeah, yeah. And it is annoying because I basically stop looking and reading and then I get yelled at because it was in the newsletter and I’m like, I don't read the newsletter. Why don't you read the newsletter? Because it's a pain in the ass to read on my phone. I don’t sit down on my computer and read it.

(29:35) Yeah. So. So you're coming to my side of the fence on this - is what I'm hearing? I never like to say that, Mike. I’m never going to commit to saying that. I’m here - you're there. Got it. Okay. We are going to keep the boundaries. Let's move this. Is that? Starting to build a build a natural, natural fence.

(29:56) I could probably fight through that pretty easily. Give me 20 minutes. Now. But when this grows, when this grows, we're going to. It hasn’t... Maybe it needs water. yeah. We might end up with, like, home improvement Wilson on the other side of the. Yeah. where you just see each other's eyes. We’ll have to have another camera shot. I’m figuring that out so I can just see...

(30:14) Yep, yep. you're not you're not totally sold. But you're you're softening your stance. I’m softening my stance, I see the point of it. It was when you said the a-word, analytics. You know, I just start drooling for some reason. You might not even need to use analytics, but you could ask some people. You test, like the that's a data testing thing.

(30:34) That's not it's more you know. Let's talk about that a little bit because that brings up an interesting thing. What if your audience is always printing out PDFs. Let's say they're of a certain generation. I'm not I will I would soften my stance. I would say you're meeting them where they're at, that you're meeting them with their needs.

(30:51) Who's your audience? Once again, we always I think every podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Don’t we at some point say “Who’s your audience?” We need to know how people are using this stuff. We need to start a game show, maybe. “Who's Your Audience?” you know, then. Oh, yeah. Just a thought. I want that long mic that a...

(31:08) The Bob Barker one? Yeah. The one that was like you just hold... his hand down by his waist basically. Yeah. Speak into it that way. That was Golden age. I guess. The guy before Drew Carey. Yeah, yeah. But there was even, like, on The Match Game. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This set kind of reminds me of The Match Game a little bit, doesn’t it? Well that was the inspiration. Well not the. Yes.

(31:32) Not that show specifically, that era. Of that. Specifically that era. Yes. Yeah. Mike Douglas, Dinah Shore... We're losing all our audience. Keep keep the timely references coming. I've heard of an interactive PDF. Now I assume that that means a variety of different things. But what do you what do you think of when you hear interactive PDF first just to define what that means? I don't know what that is.

(31:55) Okay. I don't want to know what that is and I'm not going to respond. My lawyer says. No, I, you know what’s funny? I've seen that in InDesign all the time. Interactive PDF, and I think that a lot of it this oh, I welcome the feedback on this. My understanding on that is it's probably came from designer snobs who are used to using InDesign and loved all the control design control that they had in, in, in that.

(32:30) Right? And every but they're other people are asking them to make PDF or make PowerPoints that were interactive, that had things like that. You could click through and everything like that. Animated things, characters? And they’re like, I don’t want to learn. I don't want to learn PowerPoint. Microsoft stuff sucks.

(32:48) I don't want to use that. Like, I wish we could do this in InDesign. There's a weird zone there before Figma or even Sketch and all these tools in like, like there's this weird wild West when people were trying to like the design tools for digital mediums were just like people, like scratching and clawing and trying to find a way.

(33:13) And I feel like InDesign added a bunch of weird stuff in that era, like flexible layout things where you could change the size of the thing, Yeah, it's like a liquid layout tool where you could, like, you could design things for different viewports, which is basically the main thing we've been talking about this whole time is that the ability to kind of like cater to different things, but it was probably the wrong tool to do that.

(33:40) But they the Adobe didn't have a great answer for that. They had to put it somewhere. And layout for in InDesign probably made the most sense. And there’s probably more people using InDesign maybe than any of their other programs. Yeah. And then you got all these people who want to recreate PowerPoints in a better tool.

(33:55) So they've got this thing that has design control. Wow, OK thats... The historians can go fact check all this and see if that's really what this is all about. But I've, I never I never even thought about interactive. I never think about interactive PDFs. Adobe Confidential maybe. That would be the other podcast... Yep yep yep.

(34:13) Something that goes deep dive. What’s the backstory? Why? Why did you do this Adobe? Yeah. Why this why that? Why? I've written Adobe many times I'm sure about some sort of list that they... I love Adobe, I've been working with Adobe for 30 some years. Yep. You know, I’m chained to it... I think it was either an old Twitter feed or an old Tumblr or something like that.

(34:40) Somebody would write humorous, anecdotes into the crash reports that would pop up for like Photoshop or Illustrator and they would like, and I would get such a kick out of them. I even copied them a little bit. A few times they'd come up and I'd have some snarky comments about what I was doing. And you.

(34:59) Do you ever sign those crash reports? No. I gave up Yeah, I kind of stopped doing that too. it was like, what was I doing? Oh, I just, I was in one program. I switched over to this one and I tried to move and it crashed. It was like, tell me what you were doing. Like. Just working on my computer. Maybe they've added too many features too fast and using up all the computing resources and couldn't figure out how to.

(35:19) That’s impossible, Mike, Come on....Okay. That's a topic for another day. I this is the most ill informed topic of conversation we've had so far. But! Yes. That won't stop me from speculating. That's a pretty good list though of uninformed topics, Mike. I mean we have covered a lot of those. So...

(35:38) I. I would just say it feels like the there like it came out of a desire for back in the olden days when the internet was new in web design, required coding and all that stuff. There's a lot of designers like screw that. I don't want to learn how, I just want to put something on the internet like, give me, let me use InDesign to put something on the internet like you could built.

(36:04) I think you could, I wouldn't I mean, back to the point of this whole thing. I wouldn't create a website in a PDF. You could do it. You can you could do it. You can click through and have interactive things. But then it's like this weird, like Franken monster. That's not a PowerPoint. We are not advising people do that I think.

(36:25) Is that where we're going with this? No, no.... Don’t do that, please. Go open up a Wix thing and create it there. Or Webflow - Webflow. Yeah. Just to boil it down. PDFs are evil. I hate them. Mike hates them. Viewport? That’s what it comes down to? Consider your audience where they're consuming this stuff and what they're doing with it. Yeah, okay.

(36:51) And think twice about firing up a design program and saving out a PDF. We've talked a lot about PDFs today. We've sensed some energy, some negative energy around them. Contrarian energy. I like to say. Not black and white. Not oh no. Not they’re all bad. Just think about think about it. Use the tool wisely. Yeah. Okay.

(37:16) Yeah. Just consider who you're who are you creating this stuff or what are they doing with it? Who's your audience? Yeah. The game show coming soon. Yeah. Yeah. Alright. That sounds great. Great place to end the podcast, Mike? Would you agree? I think we can wrap up. OK. Think twice before you PDF. Thanks man. Thanks.

(37:38) See you. Thank you. Thanks for tuning in. For more information and other episodes, subscribe to the marketing team of one podcast on YouTube, Apple or Spotify Podcast Networks. You can also chat with us on the r/marketingteamofone subreddit, or visit marketingteamofone.net to learn more.

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