Paper document, digital document

Paper documents, once thought to be in danger of extinction, seem to be here to stay in the digital age. Every day, this old-fashioned medium fulfills a number of functions and uses for which few users would prefer a digital version (digital documents are those designed and intended for use on a screen). It is with a view to understanding this phenomenon of resistance to the "paperless office" that this article attempts to list the main differences between the two media from four points of view: material (media properties and characteristics), cognitive (structure representation, location, navigation), physiological (reading comfort, posture) and usage (preferred types of use, reading modes, familiarity). This study does not claim to be an exhaustive compendium of the characteristic features of each medium, but rather to highlight the essential, fundamentally new dimensions that designers of "digital" documents need to identify when constructing a document of this type.