WHY us this a thing? Are people really to lazy to copypaste the text of the PDF they use to print their menus into their website?
Nothing ruins the mood faster than a PDF menu on mobile 😭 just let me scroll like a normal person.
I would love if most restaurants had pdfs.
Lately it seems almost every restaurant’s “menu” button takes you to an online ordering site where you have to pretend like you’re ordering to view the menu.
That is very much not what I asked for when I clicked “menu”. I clicked menu because I want to see a god damn menu.
PSA: Android Firefox can show PDFs without throwing it into your Downloads folder.
Interesting, I was a bit confused about the problem here, considering I’ve used Firefox for years.
It’s the only reason I started to use Firefox on Android, then stayed for the noscript
I really don’t mind a pdf menu
What’s wrong with a pdf menu
They’re usually the same PDF that’s designed for a giant paper menu, so I feel like I’m reading a huge document through a peephole.
A “responsive” website that reshapes the document to fit your screen size is usually a better experience. But I’ve certainly seen it done poorly and wished they hadn’t tried to be clever.
Also, PDFs exported for printing are full-quality without lossy compression. I once downloaded a 150 MB menu because the graphic designer exported the PDF with images without any compression or resizing whatsoever.
Online menus: dumb
Print PDF accessible online: great!
I wish dynamic support for user preferences was more of a thing. I like really dense displays of information with small text. Basically, the more a UI resembles a spreadsheet the better. Mobile interfaces almost universally have far too much white space for my taste, so I’m one of those people that’s pretty much always going to want the PDF even on a phone screen. I recognize why that would suck for a lot of people though.
On mobile? A lot.
the fact that they embedded it inline so it downloads instead of rendering on the page.
it’s because most of these sites are hosted from vendors that charge per “change” and small businesses will point their dynamic stuff to google drive which doesn’t always allow stuff to be embedded and rendered within HTML. google does this to combat abuse like this where companies will host their entire website from a Google drive for “free”.
My assumption would’ve been they do PDFs, because they have the same menu printed out in their restaurant. They’re gonna need an A4/letter size format either way, so PDF is the simplest way of putting that same format onto their webpage.
you’re correct.
also, PDFs aren’t limited to A4. I have PDFs that span thousands of A4 pages that is meant for a large format plotter printer.
Yeah I hate that. But I understand the non-techies which already struggle at generating a PDF file. I see the error with the mobile devices. There is no reason not to just open the PDF straight away.
Sometimes I wonder how many dumbass small businesses Google Maps has kept afloat by the mere fact that they surface user photos of the menus on their business listings.
It’s a double edged sword though because hours of operation are pretty unreliable if you don’t go to the business’ own website. I’ve been burned a bunch of times discovering that hours have changed since the last time that site was updated. Sometimes you can even see multiple different closing times for the same business (from like google, yelp, yellow pages, AI search response) and every single one is wrong.
I miss the days when the future looked promising.
I’ve been burned by that, too. My wife and I went to visit an historic house, and they clarified that they are actually only open in the summer - they only happened to be there because someone was looking at using it for a wedding. Google gave me the correct hours but didn’t take the season into account.
Pizza place nearby in college had a wrong number listed on their website. Fortunately the site’s header was a photo of the restaurant which included a neon sign of the correct phone number.
Would be better if the average human knew how to fucking take photos.
Still better than blurry pictures of outdated menu cards, usually only one or two pages of them.
Plot twist: Low resolution, highly compressed raster image in PDF
Yep. Bad photographs of the menu turned into a PDF…
the worst is when it redirects you to a 3rd party website that demands your address and phone number for pickup.
or, like pizza pizzas website where you cant even see anything on the site without giving personal information because they want to ‘find the one closet to you’
like no… you’re trying to charge more for certain neighbourhoods. fek off
I’m pretty sure it’s because they’re franchises and the franchisees can set their own prices.
Except for specific price points for advertised specials that they choose to participate in, no pricing is chain wide. So there isn’t really a good solution other than the one they implement.
This makes sense but then they should give you the option to choose which location rather than forcing you to put your address in.
The non-malicious reason is so they know which franchise location would make the food that gets delivered to you or which one is closest for pickup. There are also malicious reasons and you might be picking up food somewhere further away which makes the requirement terrible.
I’ve had been redirected more than once to a fucking google drive for the menu, where it prompted me to log into my account to check the files
It could be worse. A “more information” button that automatically starts a voice/video call to the restaurant.
How to traumatise an introvert. 😄
Thanks, Satan.
Lol imagine the poor staff at the kebab shop when I video-call in after my third whiskey sour to order my sloppy kapsalon.
Sorry, best I can do is pictures of the decor and attractive people with drinks smiling and laughing, take it or leave it
Stock photos of people with drinks, smiling and laughing.
FTFY
And don’t expect a phone number or an address. That’s hidden in tiny text as a png link at the bottom. Why would anyone need to know the address of the restaurant? Look at our sliding animations!
What, you want to find the hours of operation too? What are you, some kind of commie?
Here’s an outdated menu with items we no longer make and prices that were already inaccurate in 2019, with an update in 2020 that they can do alcohol for pickup orders (but no mention that they stopped in 2021).
AS LONG AS IT CONTAINS THE PRICES HOW HARD IS IT TO PUT PRICES IN YOUR MENU DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND NO PRICES = WON’T VISIT
If you have to ask, you can’t afford it.
If I have to ask I lose interest, especially if it is affordable.
I have walked out of two restaurants that had no menus, but QR codes that did this exact thing. Fuck the QR code, but damn, at least make it work
Better than menu.exe
I get why they have PDFs of their menu, but just transcribe that to a page on the site. It’s really not hard. My phone downloads folder is full of these.
