Two years ago, I created a document viewer as an H5P content type for a client. That document viewer is able to display a PDF document in a web page (and prepared for others), but it will never see the light of the open web. In contrast to what I normally do, I did not try to convince my client to allow this to be used by everyone. Quite the contrary, I only accepted the job because the content type will stay on my client’s platform. While many people might love to have the option to include PDFs in H5P content, I don’t like it:
- PDFs are not necessarily meant for allowing a pixel-perfect fixed layout of a document, but that is how they are used. That’s not how the web works – and nobody needs to code HTML directly nowadays to add an image or similar shenanigans …
- PDFs are rather meant for being printed, not for being displayed on a screen.
- PDFs can in theory be pretty accessible, but in practice they are not.
But first and foremost: There are too many platforms out there which are nothing but PDF dispensers. Educators often just dump their materials that they have created elsewhere, e.g. Word documents or PowerPoint documents in PDF format. That’s not what I want to encourage.
So, why do I bring this topic up now? I just recently found a proof-of-concept for a PDF viewer for H5P and raised the question with the maintainer whether it was really a good idea to create one considering the arguments that I just mentioned. In theory, I could still ask my client to make their version available. It is already done and working nicely and why should work be done twice, right? But my “conscience” kicked in again and I asked here and there on the web for thoughts. Valid points were made for and against a PDF viewer in H5P.
Long story short: I stick with my previous opinion. The idea of H5P was to embrace HTML and web standards. I don’t think PDFs fit in here despite being kind of an open standard. And I do not want to encourage people to use PDFs for creating web based content for teaching and learning, regardless of whether there might me some legit use case or not.
That said: If you do not agree with me and would welcome a PDF viewer content type for H5P, then that is totally fine. No need for discussion. I am sure others don’t share my concerns either and are going to create their own solution for their own reasons. No need for me to try getting permission to spread the existing version. It’s about a day’s work only, so really not a big obstacle. And I think that H5P ambassador David Lohner has some valuable ideas on how this should be implemented, so hopefully people are going to listen to him!