The Distribution of Users’ Computer Skills: Worse Than You Think (2016)

BodaciousMunchkin@links.hackliberty.org to Technology@lemmy.world – 320 points –
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Really?

The PDF contains the information. The screenshot contains a picture of the information.

It's a tree vs. a picture of a tree. A recording vs. a live performance.

It’s possible to make a rasterized pdf - that would just be an image with specs for printing. I think teachers need to specify their expectations. Submit a plain text file? Submit a markdown document? Submit a Word doc? Is hand-written okay? What about a type-writer?

A pdf is just a digital version of paper, and since paper is obsolete, the pdf is probably a bit archaic for somebody who has no intention of printing it.

PDFs are searchable, zoomable (i.e. don't look like shit on high-res displays), are often much smaller, have nicer software for handling them (image viewers are usually not designed for this task), and so on.