When I finally got around to trying the PDF version of the Warsaw Times-Union, I was pleasantly surprised.
It would be more accurate to say "shocked and astounded." All my previous experience with PDF has been with files posted by people who don't know anything about PDF except that it's really, really easy to save a document as PDF -- if I happen to notice that a link leads to a PDF file, I don't click on it, and when it's a file that I can't avoid -- the manual for my new phone, for example -- all the time I'm trying to extract information from it, I'm snarling and complaining that if they couldn't make a proper electronic document, they could at least post the file on Lulu so that I could buy a legible copy.
But the paper hires people who know how to create a PDF file -- and it turns out that the newspaper format takes to the screen the way a duck takes to water.
When it comes up, I can read all the headlines with only a slight shift up and down. (This probably doesn't apply to people using the more-common landscape monitors.) One click, and I can read the caption to a two-column photograph, a second click, and I can read a column -- and the spot where I click stays on the screen.
I've noticed a few bugs:
If I absent-mindedly click the browser's back arrow instead of the PDF's previous-page arrow, I'm taken out of the document entirely.
The mouse won't move the page all the way to the left or bottom, and if I adjust the right-hand column with the scroll bar, then try to move the column up or down with the mouse, it will jump to the right and cover the last two letters of each line. Likewise, if you use the scroll bar to expose the bottom, attempting to move sideways with the mouse will cause the image to jump down and cover the last line.
Speaking of images, I can't clip out a recipe or a garage-sale ad.
Theoretically I could print out the page and clip that, but printing means putting a whole newspaper-size page on a letter-size sheet of paper, and I'm reading the electronic version because my eyes aren't good enough to read the paper version. There's a way around that involving a screenshot and two other programs; it's easier to mark the location of the garage sale on my map.
Wouldn't it be cool if one could view a map with all the garage sales marked on it? There are lots of people who know how do do that, but I doubt that there are any who know how to get paid for their time.