PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption

There is an interesting article on Jakob Nielsen's Alertbox about just how unusable PDFs are on the web. I have never liked PDFs for many of the reasons Nielsen sites on the article.

Because Nielsen provides advice to creators of content, rather than those who invented the tools in the first place, he doesn't provide any useful solutions.. just workarounds. I don't expect to ever see a layout solution that works well for e-books, web browsing AND printing, but hopefully Adobe (or a competitor) is paying attention, and will make it much easier to design a document for multiple formats.