Publishing #opendata in Portable Document Format (PDF) files

Seriously don’t do it. Open data users don’t want it. Believe me I’ve asked:

I received a lot of responses. They kept me occupied for most of the weekend. The 1st and most graphic was from the founder of OpenSensors.io:

Parsing (automatically analysing the contents) of a PDF file is challenging. Without the correct knowledge and tools, any data in a PDF file is rendered inert:

Several replies accused publishers of ignorance and obstruction:

I’ve barely scratched the surface of the responses I received. This blog post doesn’t do them justice. But it does start to highlight the issue with PDFs.

Please stop publishing them. Please start using other formats.

Need a hand? Email me.