They’re usually the same PDF that’s designed for a giant paper menu, so I feel like I’m reading a huge document through a peephole.
A “responsive” website that reshapes the document to fit your screen size is usually a better experience. But I’ve certainly seen it done poorly and wished they hadn’t tried to be clever.
I wish dynamic support for user preferences was more of a thing. I like really dense displays of information with small text. Basically, the more a UI resembles a spreadsheet the better. Mobile interfaces almost universally have far too much white space for my taste, so I’m one of those people that’s pretty much always going to want the PDF even on a phone screen. I recognize why that would suck for a lot of people though.
Also, PDFs exported for printing are full-quality without lossy compression. I once downloaded a 150 MB menu because the graphic designer exported the PDF with images without any compression or resizing whatsoever.
Which is funny because the quality you want for print is usually like ~75dpi whereas web viewing you want more like ~300dpi so if anything the print version of the menu should be smaller
the fact that they embedded it inline so it downloads instead of rendering on the page.
it’s because most of these sites are hosted from vendors that charge per “change” and small businesses will point their dynamic stuff to google drive which doesn’t always allow stuff to be embedded and rendered within HTML. google does this to combat abuse like this where companies will host their entire website from a Google drive for “free”.
My assumption would’ve been they do PDFs, because they have the same menu printed out in their restaurant. They’re gonna need an A4/letter size format either way, so PDF is the simplest way of putting that same format onto their webpage.
I really don’t mind a pdf menu
What’s wrong with a pdf menu
They’re usually the same PDF that’s designed for a giant paper menu, so I feel like I’m reading a huge document through a peephole.
A “responsive” website that reshapes the document to fit your screen size is usually a better experience. But I’ve certainly seen it done poorly and wished they hadn’t tried to be clever.
they’re a restaurant, not a Web developer, the important thing is if the food is good lol
I wish dynamic support for user preferences was more of a thing. I like really dense displays of information with small text. Basically, the more a UI resembles a spreadsheet the better. Mobile interfaces almost universally have far too much white space for my taste, so I’m one of those people that’s pretty much always going to want the PDF even on a phone screen. I recognize why that would suck for a lot of people though.
Also, PDFs exported for printing are full-quality without lossy compression. I once downloaded a 150 MB menu because the graphic designer exported the PDF with images without any compression or resizing whatsoever.
Which is funny because the quality you want for print is usually like ~75dpi whereas web viewing you want more like ~300dpi so if anything the print version of the menu should be smaller
Online menus: dumb
Print PDF accessible online: great!
On mobile? A lot.
just pinch to zoom in… what’s the problem ?
Usability, see only part of the text, must scroll a lot.
the fact that they embedded it inline so it downloads instead of rendering on the page.
it’s because most of these sites are hosted from vendors that charge per “change” and small businesses will point their dynamic stuff to google drive which doesn’t always allow stuff to be embedded and rendered within HTML. google does this to combat abuse like this where companies will host their entire website from a Google drive for “free”.
My assumption would’ve been they do PDFs, because they have the same menu printed out in their restaurant. They’re gonna need an A4/letter size format either way, so PDF is the simplest way of putting that same format onto their webpage.
you’re correct.
also, PDFs aren’t limited to A4. I have PDFs that span thousands of A4 pages that is meant for a large format plotter printer.