A tweet by Priyanka Lakhara went viral this week — 5.6 million views and counting:
“IT’S WILD THAT THE MOST EFFECTIVE WAY TO SAVE SOMETHING AS A PDF IS TO LIE TO YOUR COMPUTER THAT YOU’RE ABOUT TO PRINT IT”
And the replies were full of people laughing along, calling it a quirk of software design. A funny little hack we all know about.
But she’s not wrong. And it’s not a quirk. It’s literally what’s happening.
When you hit “Print to PDF,” you are sending your document to a virtual printer. You are producing an electronic version of a printout. A fixed-layout page — no reflow, no responsiveness, no structured data. Just an image of words, frozen in place, exactly as they’d appear on a physical piece of paper that will never exist.
And we’ve all just… agreed to pretend this is normal. That this is what “sharing a document” looks like in 2026. We’ve collectively decided that digitising an analogue format — complete with all its constraints — is a totally reasonable way to communicate. Because it’s convenient. For us, not our audience.
PDFs Don’t Exist Because They’re Good. They Exist Because They’re Convenient — For the Sender.
Think about the last time someone sent you a PDF. Why did they choose that format?
It wasn’t because it was the best way for you to consume the information. It was almost certainly one of two reasons:
They wanted to prevent you from changing it. Contracts, policies, board papers. The format is chosen not to communicate, but to control. The sender’s priority is locking the document down, not making it easy for you to read, search, reference, or act on.
They wanted to make their own life easier. “Just export it as a PDF” is the path of least resistance. No need to worry about formatting breaking, fonts rendering differently, or layouts shifting. It looks the same on every screen — which sounds like a feature until you realise “the same” means “badly on most of them.”
In both cases, the choice is about the sender, not the receiver. And that’s a comms problem.
What You’re Actually Doing to Your Reader
When you send a PDF, you’re handing someone a document that:
- Doesn’t work on mobile. Pinch, zoom, scroll sideways, lose your place. A PDF on a phone is an exercise in frustration. And most of your audience is on their phone.
- Isn’t accessible. Screen readers struggle with PDFs — especially ones exported from design tools or scanned from paper. You’re actively excluding people.
- Can’t be searched properly. A scanned PDF isn’t text. It’s a photo of text. Even native PDFs store characters in ways that don’t always follow reading order.
- Kills collaboration. You can’t comment meaningfully, track changes, or build on someone else’s work. It’s a dead end by design.
- Traps data. Ever tried to pull a table out of a PDF into a spreadsheet? Then you know. The data is there — you can see it — but it’s been entombed in a layout format that treats a table as a series of positioned text fragments, not actual structured data.
You haven’t shared information. You’ve shared a picture of information.
“But PDFs Have Their Place”
Yes, they do. I’m not arguing that PDFs should never exist.
There are legitimate uses: legal documents that genuinely need to be tamper-resistant, print-ready artwork, archival records. If you need a document to look identical everywhere, forever, regardless of software — PDF does that job.
But “it needs to look identical everywhere” is a much rarer requirement than people think. Most of the time, what people actually need is for the information to be readable, accessible, and usable. A PDF optimises for none of those things.
The question isn’t “does PDF work?” It’s “work for whom?” And the answer, overwhelmingly, is: the person sending it.
This Is a Leadership Problem, Not a Preference
Here’s what frustrates me about this as a communications professional.
We spend enormous effort on messaging, tone, audience insight, channel strategy. We agonise over whether a comma is in the right place. And then we take all of that carefully crafted content and lock it inside a format that most of our audience will struggle to read on the device they’re most likely using.
That’s not a minor oversight. It’s a failure of the thing we’re supposed to be good at.
Format is part of the message. If you send someone a 47-page PDF strategy document, you haven’t communicated a strategy. You’ve communicated that you wrote one. There’s a difference.
And if you work in a regulated environment — healthcare, public services, anything with accessibility obligations — it’s worse than a comms failure. It’s a compliance risk. PDFs that aren’t properly tagged are inaccessible by default. In sectors where you’re communicating with vulnerable people, people whose first language isn’t English, people using assistive technology, defaulting to PDF isn’t just lazy. It’s exclusionary.
As comms and marketing leaders, we shouldn’t be tolerating this as the default. It’s our job to challenge it — to push back when someone says “just PDF it” and ask who the audience actually is, what device they’re on, what they need to do with the information, and whether we’re making their life easier or ours.
That means building alternatives. Web content that’s responsive and accessible. Collaboration documents that people can actually work with. Data in formats that don’t require an hour of reformatting before anyone can use it. It’s more work upfront, yes. But communication that nobody can properly access isn’t communication. It’s filing.
Good communication meets people where they are. PDFs meet people where paper was.
What to Use Instead
This isn’t complicated:
- For internal documents — use your collaboration platform. Google Docs, SharePoint, Notion, whatever your org runs on. Editable, searchable, version-controlled.
- For web content — publish it as a web page. Responsive, accessible, linkable, trackable.
- For data — send it as data. A spreadsheet, a CSV, a dashboard. Not a screenshot of a table.
- For presentations — if it has to be static, at least make it a slide deck people can navigate. Better yet, present it live and share the recording.
- For things that genuinely need to be PDFs — go ahead. But be honest with yourself about whether “genuinely needs to be” is doing the work, or whether “it’s just easier for me” is.
The Honest Truth
Priyanka’s tweet resonated because everyone has felt the absurdity of “Print to PDF.” But the real lie isn’t the one we’re telling our computers.
It’s the one we’re telling ourselves.
We’ve convinced ourselves that a format designed to replicate a physical printout is an acceptable default for digital communication. That freezing content into a fixed layout, stripping out structure, and making it hostile to the devices people actually use is just… how things are done.
It isn’t inevitable. The Government Digital Service has been actively pushing GOV.UK away from PDF and towards HTML-first publishing for years — precisely because they recognised that PDFs are an outcome of ingrained print culture and outdated content production processes, not a considered digital choice. Their position is clear: if content is meant to be read, used, and accessed by the widest possible audience, it should be published as a web page, not locked inside a digitised piece of paper.
If the UK government can commit to moving away from PDF as a default, the rest of us don’t have much of an excuse.
The PDF deserves to fall away as the default far more, and far quicker, than it has. Not because it has no purpose — it does — but because its purpose is far narrower than the role we’ve lazily given it. Every time we default to PDF without thinking, we’re choosing the sender’s convenience over the audience’s experience. And we’re pretending that’s fine.
It’s not the computer we’re lying to. It’s ourselves.
