Death to PDF – that static, non-resizable, infuriating legacy

By Zoë Rose

March 5, 2024

PDF is a relic from an era when being ‘portable’ between multiple platforms was a unique selling point.(Zennie/Private Media)

PDF stands for ‘Portable Document Format’. As far as the age of the PDF format goes, the clue is in the name — it’s a relic from an era when being ‘portable’ between multiple platforms (PC, Mac, Linux and so on) was a unique selling point.

The World Wide Web, of course, made the idea of ‘portable’ documents obsolete. Any browser on any computer can read any website and can read it in the same way — where there are differences between the platforms, they are imperceptible in all but the most unusual situations.

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