I don’t hate the concept, per se, I just haven’t ever seen a good piece done in the style. And it seems like some of the banner holders are a little too in love with their own cleverness. Not all of them, mind you, just some. Something about Always Black just bugs me, for example.
I guess the Katamari Damacy thing is old games journalism? Whatever, I want to see more of that guy.
As the poor chaps stress fairly extensively, there’s nowt New Games Journalism about the Gamer’s Quarter. It’s just wordly, lengthy, pretentious games writings. They’re not synonymous.
I am stealing New Games Livejournalism, however.
KG
Sorry to intrude in your gigantic off-topic rant but you apparently don’t realize that PDF is resolution-independent. Unlike PNG it’s a vector format, though you can optionally embed bitmaps. You get the best possible rendering on any device, from monitors to printers to typesetting machines.
Also, you can embed fonts which produces an extremely compact and convenient format for fine typesetting. You get hyperlinks (e.g. table of contents, footnotes, index), full text search, author data, annotations…
PDF is the only format that offers this combination of features. It’s not the format’s fault if some authors ignore or abuse them.
This thread is about to collapse under the weight of all the meta.
PDF is fantastic for what it was intended to be: a postscript document + all the stuff referred to by the postscript included in the file – like fonts, images, etc.
You see them on print media websites a lot because the circulation auditing authorities insist that what is on the website be exactly as what is in print, if you want to legally describe website visitors as “readers” (think ad revenue.)
Having a PDF of it is cool, but it is pretty silly to not have an HTML version of it too. You probably lose 75% of your potential audience.
postscript + fonts + images = bloatastic pdf. postscript + nothing = no reason for pdf.
You see them on print media websites a lot because the circulation auditing authorities insist that what is on the website be exactly as what is in print, if you want to legally describe website visitors as “readers” (think ad revenue.)
We have to use them for this reason, though we don’t have any ads, just auditors. Since not all of the fonts are embedded by default to keep the file size down, they don’t look the same on any machine. Since most of our jackass outside users can’t be bothered to use postscript printers, they don’t look the same when you print them. I had to demo this stuff for the NCI/NIH - the same group of retards who told me we had to use pdf for ‘security’ - I showed them side by side comparisons, different machines, different printers, different font embedding choices, etc. It was a waste of effort, as usual. We have some great scientists who push for good tech and smart decisions, but we do get steamrolled now and again. Price of govt work, I guess.
/jeep/
Next week I’ll find an excuse to whine about java in an MxO thread.
We have to use them for this reason, though we don’t have any ads, just auditors. Since not all of the fonts are embedded by default to keep the file size down, they don’t look the same on any machine.
We have had this problem too. We find that most of the time, the file size overhead incurred by embedding really isn’t that bad. It’s only a problem when an ad has too much font-wankery in it, in which case the ad can be bloody well rasterized.
We’ve tried hard at our publication to keep PDF file sizes to dial-up-tolerable levels, and often get entire pages under 100k including fonts. But informal surveys indicate most of our subscribers use fast internet, so we’re slowly not caring anymore, and thinking about just piping them standard high quality 300k+ pdf files.
In fact, I think broadband is the driving force behind the increasing web-acceptability of PDF. The “web is not print” point has been rammed relentlessly into our heads for 10 years, but the point is now well taken and we’ve found people are just fine with paying to see PDF files if the content is interesting to them.
You’re right that PDF security is a joke. But as long as PDF is seen just as a convenient “single file” wrapper for postscript, text, images and fonts, all is good.