To be fair, PDFs have always been complete and utter cockshit to deal with and how you deal with it has changed over time.
For awhile there, you used the Print dialog. Because the PDF authoring software was implemented like a printer driver. Because if you know the history of PDF, it makes a certain kind of sense to do it that way because the bones of PDF is PostScript. Except it’s a dogshit way of implementing the UI, because the user is trained to create a file, you click Save. To create a physical sheet of paper, you click Print. Now you’re asking to create a file, by clicking Print. Makes as much sense as the FCC’s website.
Some programs now implement it through the Save dialog, others have a “Save as PDF…” option in the File menu, and others have an “Export” and/or “Export As…” which I bet a lot of folks who know what that means and would know to look there would struggle to turn it into words.
Oh, and then…when I was in high school, they trained us on Office '97. When I was in college, they trained us on Office '03. My first non-minimum wage job? Equipped with Office '07. Ribbon interface, no more File Edit View Preview Tools Help. Microsoft especially has a bad habit of moving shit around so that your tools don’t work the way you’re used to and offering no training or hints that anyone can actually find.
My favorite was when an update would change, hide, or remove a feature I had never heard of that was absolutely critical to one person’s workflow for an essential task that affected everyone, like payroll.
It was real fucking fun arriving in the workforce college educated with computer literacy classes on my transcripts not knowing how to run MS Office because they changed it out from under me. Even if the ribbon interface is objectively superior, they just dumped it on people.
My father found, buried on Microsoft’s website, a tool (I think written in Silverlight because it was about that time) that simulated MS Office 2003, you could click on a function, and then it would play an animation about how to do that function in Office 2007. This wasn’t advertised and it wasn’t shipped on the disc with Office '07, which NEEDED a retraining tool.
Office '10 was different yet again, and they also shifted a lot from XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 and that’s when I switched to Linux.
To be fair, PDFs have always been complete and utter cockshit to deal with and how you deal with it has changed over time.
For awhile there, you used the Print dialog. Because the PDF authoring software was implemented like a printer driver. Because if you know the history of PDF, it makes a certain kind of sense to do it that way because the bones of PDF is PostScript. Except it’s a dogshit way of implementing the UI, because the user is trained to create a file, you click Save. To create a physical sheet of paper, you click Print. Now you’re asking to create a file, by clicking Print. Makes as much sense as the FCC’s website.
Some programs now implement it through the Save dialog, others have a “Save as PDF…” option in the File menu, and others have an “Export” and/or “Export As…” which I bet a lot of folks who know what that means and would know to look there would struggle to turn it into words.
Oh, and then…when I was in high school, they trained us on Office '97. When I was in college, they trained us on Office '03. My first non-minimum wage job? Equipped with Office '07. Ribbon interface, no more File Edit View Preview Tools Help. Microsoft especially has a bad habit of moving shit around so that your tools don’t work the way you’re used to and offering no training or hints that anyone can actually find.
My favorite was when an update would change, hide, or remove a feature I had never heard of that was absolutely critical to one person’s workflow for an essential task that affected everyone, like payroll.
It was real fucking fun arriving in the workforce college educated with computer literacy classes on my transcripts not knowing how to run MS Office because they changed it out from under me. Even if the ribbon interface is objectively superior, they just dumped it on people.
My father found, buried on Microsoft’s website, a tool (I think written in Silverlight because it was about that time) that simulated MS Office 2003, you could click on a function, and then it would play an animation about how to do that function in Office 2007. This wasn’t advertised and it wasn’t shipped on the disc with Office '07, which NEEDED a retraining tool.
Office '10 was different yet again, and they also shifted a lot from XP to Vista to 7 to 8 to 8.1 and that’s when I switched to Linux.