I am not a big fan of notion, but printing a document (even as a pdf) is an increasingly niche usecase in an increasingly digital-only world and I can totally understand if they don't put in much effort into it.
One of my clients wants it for everything (typically text, stats, and graphs), and typically views it as just an "add a button" sort of feature, when it winds up being a "reimplement the layout in a different language" sort of thing. (leaving apart the thing where basically they want a gigantic lovecrafian horror of an excel file translated to the web)
PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document. Even if it's not printed, it's something that people want.
> PDFs have the ability to be a fixed, baked reference of a document
I completely agree. Having the ability to look at what a dynamic document looked like at a particular moment in time (and be able to archive it), is a very important feature. In a dynamic document like Notion, people will still want to know what the data/doc looked like when decisions are made. Page-based layouts make this much easier.
What you're talking about is a failure in the "addressability" section of the digital media rubric. It's not page-based layouts that make this easy. That's entirely orthogonal. (This new Pageless feature of Google Docs, for example, doesn't make it any better or worse at satisfying the use case you're referring to than it was before.)
I’m thinking specifically as using PDFs as an archival format to snapshot the state of a document at a moment in time. PDFs are inherently page-based (well, at least in the way they are commonly used in business, I know they could be any dimension, but that’s still a “page”).
It isn’t just the ability to have temporal addressability (if I’m using the word the same way as you). I don’t really care if I can time machine back to see how a notion document looked two weeks ago. I need the ability to archive that document, save it outside of notion, send it to my client, etc. You can do this with many different formats, and could also export JSON objects if necessary.
However, when it comes to mixing layout and data, PDF is a pretty good format that has good existing tooling.
So, it’s not entirely orthogonal… it’s not just about recording state in time. You have to be able to share it in a meaningful format — independent of the original application.
A full single-file archival HTML file would really get you pretty far in the regard (embedded CSS, no JS, data/base64 images). You might even convince me that JS is okay if needed to render the page, but a static dom would be better.
All the things you said about PDF are true. You can say other true things, like that it's true that PDF gives these nice archival properties and that at the same time it's true that PDF begins with the letter P. Nevertheless, it doesn't make sense to conclude that what you want from an archive format is for it to begin with the letter P. That PDF simulates physical pages (versus not) is similarly beside the point.
Sure, but the particular PDF I emailed you is immutable (by me). It's sitting in my Sent folder and your Inbox folder in our respective email clients, and we can both be sure what it said.
Notion could implement a feature like "permalink to the content as it was at this point in time". Maybe they already have. But for me to be sure that's an immutable record, I at least have to trust Notion.
I don't see where checksums come into it - either I trust Notion to tell me I'm getting the same document we agreed on, or I need to be able to download the document in a readable form and compute the hash on my client. In which case we're back at PDF again.
Could also just be a temporary thing for now. Wasn’t long ago when signing things over the internet wasn’t a thing. People adapt slowly to changing technological advancement. Businesses can take even longer to adapt (requires then to fail + a new generation to bring along new ways with them and supplant the old way).
I haven't actually printed a document in years, but I export PDFs pretty regularly. When sharing documents with enterprise customers, it's far more reliable to share a PDF than to share a link to a document which is often restricted due to access rules on my side or firewall rules on their side.
Submitting assignments as pdf’s is extremely common at Universities. It feels like literally everything needs to be a pdf.
Also, when sending something to a client, it’s way more professional to send them a pdf document as an attachment they can open right in their browser instead of some obscure google docs / notion link.
