Serving Dynamic PDF Files
By Godrey Nolan
Adobe's Portable Document Format (PDF) is the second most common document format on the Internet. Although HTML may be a distant first, PDF is the de facto standard for Web documents that require precise layout and printing.
The benefits of PDF over HTML include browser independence, increased security, and a much greater degree of control over the document's presentation to the end user. For example, PDF documents appear in print just as they do on screen, whereas HTML documents come with no guarantees as to how they'll look when printed.
Rather than compete, PDF and HTML formats tend to coexist on the Web. This is mainly due to drawbacks with PDF technology. PDF files are often much larger than HTML files, and browsers must use the Adobe Acrobat plug-in to read them. The closest competitor, then, is the Microsoft Word document format. However, most people prefer PDF to Word for document display, because it's easier to create complex designs in PDF, and the format is portable across many platforms.
It's somewhat surprising, though, that few Web applications output PDF files. There are plenty of PDF documents on the Web, but only a small number of them are dynamically generated. The reason for this, it can be argued, is that PDF documents aren't practical in a number of cases. This is true, but there are also a significant number of cases where PDF documents are the best choice. Online tax forms, such as those generated by TurboTax for the Web (www.turbotax.com), must be printed out in a way that does not modify the government-mandated formatting.<>
