With digital publishing, there’s a lot of different formats to choose from. The PDF or portable document format still provides an easy way to create files that are broadly compatible with many devices. As a general rule, choose PDF when these factors are important:
- Use PDF when preserving layout is the most important feature. This is often true for things that have been “laid out.”
- PDF can preserve all content, formatting, and fonts as you intended.
Some drawbacks of PDF on tablet and other mobile devices:
- Documents are formatted as either portrait or landscape and do not change.
- You cannot re-flow a PDF like an app or EPUB to adjust the size of content.
- Fonts are static and cannot be changed or sized by the reader
- You cannot easily insert video into PDFs for mobile viewing
