EP05 - PNG vs PDF

You're using a photograph of a shape. You need the blueprint for the shape itself.

It is. At one specific size. You have a mosaic. When you stretch it, you're just making the tiles bigger.

Try that one.

Because they weren't born to compete. They were born to solve two completely different, very painful problems.

PNG ancestor is the GIF, built for a world when internet still came through a telephone line. Every byte was precious.

GIF was created by CompuServe in the late 80s and became the default way to put graphics on the early web, because it used clever compression to keep images small enough for slow dial-up modems.

But Unisys, the company that held the patent on the GIF's compression algorithm, started demanding licensing fees from anyone who used it.

In response, a group of engineers and programmers across the internet banded together and created PNG—the 'Portable Network Graphics' format.

Exactly. PNG is a symbol of open technology.

PDF was born to solve a different kind of chaos.

In the early 90s, there was no guarantee a document would look the same from one computer to the next. Adobe's solution was to create a 'digital stone tablet'.

The PDF's purpose was **to preserve a document's layout perfectly, everywhere, forever.** It contains the fonts, the images, the vector blueprints, all in one self-contained box. It solved the problem of digital chaos.

No. Do not do that. That is a terrible idea.

It's better for *your* eyes. It's a nightmare for the bots.

Shez, how does our internal search chatbot work? How does Google index our public reports? How do our AI tools analyze market data?

A PNG is a simple, honest grid of data. The AI can ingest it instantly. A PDF is a locked box of instructions. The AI has to waste immense energy just trying to reverse-engineer the document to extract the raw text and images. It's called the **Parsing Tax**.

Google's search bots will have a harder time indexing the content, so our SEO ranking will drop. Our internal search bot will be slower and more likely to **hallucinate** because it struggles to pull clean facts from the complex layout.

You're optimizing for one audience at the expense of the other. Today, the machine audience is just as important.

The PDF isn't going away. It will always be the king of its niche.

That. The bridge from digital to analog. When you need to print a contract, a scientific paper, or a boarding pass and know with 100% certainty how it will look on paper, you use a PDF.

This is the trade-off of the modern internet.