Finally, A Warning When Opening a PDF

You’ll have to excuse my ignorance if this has been going on for a while, but I got some great news when I logged into Wingspan earlier today. Why I did that in the first place will remain a mystery (let’s just say that class I’ve been watching like the Rock Band demo at Best Buy hasn’t opened up), so let’s not think about that.

My biggest complain about PDF has always been that it requires a separate program read something. I haven’t figured out why someone who has already taken the time to type something out and has alloted the time to put it on the internet would want to take extra time to turn it into a PDF. For that matter, I haven’t figured out why they think I’ll be willing to open another program just to read the message.

It seems that whoever puts together Wingspan is at least listening to my prayers.

I still don’t like that I have to open a separate program to read that direct deposit will now be required to receive a refund check unless we want these checks going to our permanent address. That’s something that is sort of important to students. I could understand if there was some fancy formatting or font that might get messed up if it was set as a plain HTML page. But there isn’t any of this. It’s just straight text with a font that comes on every computer.

What does make me happy however is that there is a warning next to the link that the message will be a PDF.

Finally, someone at Winthrop has realized that opening something in a new program without a warning isn’t something that most people will enjoy. Now if only we could convince them that a PDF isn’t necessary in order to convey a message.

But I have to give the PDF users credit, they’re not as bad as the people who make 1 slide Power Point presentations that are sent out over the Daily Student Announcements.