Publishers of online magazines and newspapers have been finding that to replicate print-quality formatting and design, its tough to beat PDFs.
After all, the format allows fonts to be preserved, images to be precisely placed, and reader experience to be consistent no matter what browser theyre using.
The difficulty, however, is when readers want to search across the files for certain stories or by keyword, according to Nigel Pilcher, president of U.K.-based Nlightened Software.
Pilcher creates a monthly magazine that is put online in PDF format, and he says he appreciates that with Adobe Acrobat he can search across multiple documents in a folder for a keyword, and find all the files containing that string.
What he craves is for this capability to be extended to Web site visitors without the need for them to download each issues PDF files to their computers, and try searching on the files from there.
If the PDF files were searchable from the site, he says, it would be far easier for readers to see multiple issues, and simply have a better reading experience.