Summary: PDF is not a text format! Stop using it like one!
Imagine writing a story you’re proud of, and then ruining it by exporting it as a fucking PDF
— はるる/Haley Halcyon/·𐑣𐑱𐑤𐑦 𐑣𐑨𐑤𐑕𐑾𐑯/jan Eli (@haruruchandesu.bsky.social) 2025 April 22 at 16:26
This is my PSA for people to stop sharing their writing as PDF files, inspired by Don’t Ask to Ask and No Hello.
Every day, I see people sharing their stories, ideas, and other text documents as PDF files. And even on websites like FurAffinity (don’t ask), some people post stories as PDF files. And it’s a horrible experience for everybody!
PDFs are made for print media. It descends from PostScript, a language created to talk to printers. A PDF document stores the position of each character of text relative to a fixed-size page.[1] While modern PDF files have digital-only features like digital forms, embedded video, and digital signatures, the way that PDF files act has not changed: the layout and size of the page is fixed.
[1] While a standard called PDF/UA exists to allow users to use screen readers and resize or reflow text, adoption is pretty much nonexistent.
What’s the problem with that? Well, try clicking on “Simulate PDF document” to see what happens...
The problems with PDF files all stem from them being designed for printed documents at their core.
Have you ever tried to copy text from a PDF? It’s disgusting. And judging from Web search results for “copying text from PDF”, it often garbles the text.
The root of the problem is that PDF files store the position of each character on the page, not a string of characters as a block of text. That’s why, when you copy text from a PDF, you often have to remove extra line breaks before you can use it. The PDF file doesn’t know the difference between a line break inserted by the writer and a line break it inserted by automatically breaking the text to the next line.
And because a PDF stores layout, not text, there’s no good way to go back to editing a document you only saved as a PDF. This is also why Word lets you “export as” a PDF, not “save as” a PDF. It knows that you’re not gonna want to save as a PDF with the expectation of loading it and picking up where you left off!
These days, most of us read most of our text on a smartphone oriented vertically. On one hand, that limits the amount of space that you can fit per line, leading to crunched-up layouts. On the other hand, we have had the technology to correct for that, even before the spread of PDF.
That solution is reflowing the document. When you open a text file on Notepad, the lines are never longer than the width of the window. While a text file stores where to break the line to start a new paragraph, it doesn’t tell Notepad where to wrap the lines.
Websites are a bit different. We have something called responsive design where the layout of the entire website adapts to the width of the window or screen, like this very webpage if you don’t turn “Simulate PDF document” on.
Most novels have a smallish page size of about 13 cm across, and slightly bigger than normal 14 point text. This is because, after centuries of trial and error, we’ve realized that text is easiest to read when lines aren’t too wide or too narrow, nor letters too small or too large.
PDFs would be less of a problem if people thought twice about the page size, margin sizes, fonts, indentation, line spacing, page numbers, and more, every time they exported as a PDF. But they don’t, so your word processor just uses the default settings of A4 or US Letter paper, suitable for a printout at work, but not as reading material.
2) Because PDF is for printed documents, it sets the font size, line width, and line spacing. And because most people just use default settings when they export, you’ll be trying to read a US Letter or A4 document on a 5-inch smartphone screen, which is just like:
— はるる/Haley Halcyon/·𐑣𐑱𐑤𐑦 𐑣𐑨𐑤𐑕𐑾𐑯/jan Eli (@haruruchandesu.bsky.social) 2025 April 22 at 16:57
[image or embed]
Another side effect of PDFs being print-first is that there are margins everywhere. Every page has margins around the contents, to prevent the text being cut off. But when you’re reading the text on a screen, it just causes huge gaps between pages, sometimes in the middle of a line!
E-books use a file format called EPUB (or in the case of Kindles, an Amazon-proprietary alternative). It enables you to choose the font, the font size, and indentation settings, letting the reader configure the book how they find it easiest to read. This makes EPUB better than PDF.
Using PDFs to share your writing shows that you don’t care about the reader, or you don’t care about your writing being presented in a way that’s not a huge pain to read.
My friends I’ve complained to agreed that PDF is a bother of a file format, and it’s weird to intentionally choose to use PDF as anything but a mistake.
The first guy I confronted about this problem went on and on about PDFs being compatible with phones (as if text files and Google Docs links weren’t) and being paranoid that Google will strike their account (as if Discord was free of moderation).
There are loads of different options depending on what you’re looking to achieve by sharing a PDF file.
“Plaintext” means unformatted text, containing no font or styling information. “Rich text” means text formatted using bold and italic, sometimes also fonts, indentation, text alignment, and images.
Archive Of Our Own (AO3 for short) supports rich text using the HTML editor. If you want images, you will have to upload them elsewhere and link to it using an <img> tag.
DeviantArt sucks and is full of AI slop, but its story posting features are much better than a PDF file. You can even upload images directly in the text editor.
Tumblr allows posts to contain rich text formatting, headlines, inline images, and inline videos. Getting the text into the composition box and finagling the weird paragraph code might take some effort, though. Pillowfort is a nice Tumblr alternative if you don’t like Tumblr.
Pixiv Novels supports images and chapter breaks, but not italics, because Pixiv is Japanese and Japanese doen’t use italics. However, it supports furigana, a sorely needed Japanese-specific feature lacking from Anglophone alternatives.
There are lots of websites online that let you share both plaintext and rich text documents.
Pastebin is the most well-known text sharing service. Create an account, paste your text in, then save and share the link.
HackMD is the best Markdown sharing service. Markdown is simple: use *asterisks* for italics, **double asterisks** for bold, __double underscores__ for underlines, and # number signs at the start of the line for headlines.
If your writing tool doesn’t natively support Markdown, you can use Pandoc to convert a DOCX to Markdown. Markdown also supports inline images, though as with AO3, you’ll have to host the images elsewhere. You can also use GitHub Gists to share Markdown documents with a neat rich text preview!
Since everyone has a browser, you can guarantee that everyone can read your writing by saving the document as a no-frills HTML file. You can have your own website for free using Neocities. If you’re technically oriented, you can also use GitHub Pages and GitLab Pages to host your HTML files. If you really don’t want to host the page online, you can send people an HTML file and it’ll open in the browser.
Something neat happens when you upload a DOCX file on Google Drive. It automatically presents the file in a continuously-scrolling format that fits the width of your screen!
Now, let’s say you’re sharing some secrets or something that you’re worried that the website’s moderation will ban you for. If that’s a persistent worry for you, you should look into hosting your own Web server, so that nobody can take your writing down. For normal people, you don’t have to go that far.
Just... just stop using PDFs for any purpose other than talking to your printer (or someone with a printer) to tell them what you want printed. Okay? PDFs are more pain than it’s worth, and it’s not even suitable for the purpose you give it: sharing writing.
Coded with ♥ by Haley Halcyon as free and open-source software