Sunsetting PDFs

Intended result

• Improve documentation efficiency across an organization by ~50%+ through no longer providing styled and controlled PDFs. Mostly all of my team's time for edits is taken up by PDF formatting and reviews.
• Provide single HTML webpage documents that allow users to locally print PDFs directly from their browser when requiring a portable document.
• Include a disclaimer that the intended output is HTML and the PDF is neither controlled nor supported.

Example

Optimize the PDF output using the CSS selector @media print:

/* Print-specific styles */
@media print {
    /* Basic page setup */
    @page {
        margin: 1.5cm;
        size: A4;
    }

    /* General optimizations */
    body {
        font-size: 11pt;
        line-height: 1.3;
        background: none !important;
        color: black !important;
    }
    ...
}

Challenges

• Users often think PDFs are required by ISO9001. HTML documents satisfy all quality requirements.
• Printing a PDF from a browser isn't perfect style wise, but the content and all assets are correct. It does the job as a backup when really needed.

Background

• Formatting PDFs via documentation tools is tedious and time consuming. This often requires a trial an error approach.
• LaTeX is our only PDF option as we require some advanced math capabilities:
  • Requires some unique knowledge from technical writers as it is not intuitive
  • Large tables are difficult to render readable
  • Figures need to be converted to PNG format and manually sized
  • Large documents can take 5+ minutes to build
  • Some document types are hundreds or thousands of pages long
  • Code blocks are difficult to format
• PDF is a portable format. How often do you print your documents out?