While searching for information on a malfunctioning Dell, I found this.

If you're like me, it shouldn't be long before you're asking, "Why is this an Acrobat document?"

There are a few people at my place of work who do the same thing. Apparently no one has told them that you can type directly into an e-mail, and it is not necessary to send plain text paragraphs as PDF attachments.

I am sure they could have done this other ways... but I see no problem with what it is.

Where's the WTF?

 Right, for something like this it's useful to be able to save it easily.  Not that you couldn't also save it as HTML, but it's a bit cleaner I guess, no extra "page_files" folder or broken image links, so there's nothing wrong with doing it this way.  Turning plain text into a PDF to send it in an e-mail is a WTF, but not this.

 Since this is a pdf file that contains only links back to their website, I think it's a WTF.

I'm with the OP and ammoQ here.

Before looking at the document, I was thinking that is was probably something that was included in the manual, and available seperately for convenience, which would justify it being a PDF document.

However, since it comprises pretty much entirely of links to web pages where the actual information you want is store, it's definately a WTF.

Why would you want to save this document instead of bookmarking it if it was a web page? The document itself is useless if you don't have web access due to it only including links. Similarly, this would be very annoying if it were part of a manual.

SpoonMeiser:

I'm with the OP and ammoQ here.

Ditto. And if you've not yet installed a pdf reader you'd be a bit irritated to have to do it just to get to a document that's going to redirect you back to html pages anyway.

Ah, ok, I didn't notice the links, I didn't look carefully enough and thought it was just a plain table of info.  That definitely makes it a WTF.

burntfuse:

Ah, ok, I didn't notice the links, I didn't look carefully enough

WTF!?

ammoQ:

 Since this is a pdf file that contains only links back to their website, I think it's a WTF.

Double WTF at that... it's a PDF, which is intended to be printed, so you can OCR the links off a wooden table, into a browser, to view the appropriate page on the Dell site. 

burntfuse:

 Right, for something like this it's useful to be able to save it easily.

True, but why would you save a list of links on your local machine? Wouldn't it be easier to just bookmark a page? At least that way if the links change there's a chance someone will update the links page to reflect the new addresses (although I'll admit that's fairly unlikely).

Arenzael:

True, but why would you save a list of links on your local machine? Wouldn't it be easier to just bookmark a page? At least that way if the links change there's a chance someone will update the links page to reflect the new addresses (although I'll admit that's fairly unlikely).

What I find funny is I don't think anyone here (including me) actually has a clue about what context this pdf was actually intended for. Arguing it was the wrong tool for the job is a bit silly IMO.

MasterPlanSoftware:

What I find funny is I don't think anyone here (including me) actually has a clue about what context this pdf was actually intended for. Arguing it was the wrong tool for the job is a bit silly IMO.

My first thought was that the TechRepublic CMS offers PDF download links, and since google loves PDF documents, that version ranked higher in search results for "dell bios post codes." Turns out that, after a quick look at the downloads site, this document only seems to exist in PDF form. Some "guy" created and uploaded the PDF here: http://techrepublic.com.com/5208-6230-0.html?forumID=5&threadID=171482&start=0

According to the PDF, the original title is "Microsoft Word - dell_bios_post_error_codes.doc", and it was created using Adobe PDFMaker for Word. So my guess is this guy

    a) doesn't know HTML and/or

    b) doesn't have rights to publish to the CMS and therefore

    c) creates a collection of links in a Word document, PDF's it and then posts it on the forum.

Definitely a WTF way of doing things, but at least there weren't any wooden tables, blue-underlined text (without a clickable link), videoing in the screen or SSDS involved. It could've been worse! 

Nandurius:

my guess

Right, but we don't know if this was something he created for some other purpose and when asked a question posted it for the community...

I just find this issue hard to call a WTF. 

burntfuse:

Ah, ok, I didn't notice the links.