When I first starting seeing them I didn't get it. Why would you want some longish document in the form of what appears to be a blurry photo of the original? Except you feel as if you're manipulating it with a pair of tweezers? I would keep trying to scroll through and end up clutching at it with that tiny virtual pixie's hand. Oh yes, you can click on a "magnifiying glass" and get a bigger, blurrier picture. Then you can do some other things that don't work. I couldn't understand why everyone was so crazy for them, either. "And it's in .pdf!" "Oh, it's in .pdf? Oh, how wonderful, lovely. I always wanted .pdfs as a child but we were too poor." And soon they were everywhere, and every time you clicked on them there would be a hiatus while you look at a brightly-coloured drawing of a guy juggling a book and a microscope or something.

If you visit an electronic journal now the various issues are much more likely to be available in .pdf rather than in .html, because it's easier to print a .pdf. But that's not the real eason for .pdfs. The real reason for .pdfs is that people just have to be big bores about everything.

I was totally flabbergasted / [completelysurprised.pdf] to find that Adobe's site is of course mainly html.