People purposefully disallowing copy-paste isn't a problem with PDF: in other formats they would have embedded a picture, at least with PDF you get the other advantages of proper text: infinite zoom and great compression. Sadly there's also a lot of PDFs that are little more than a picture collection that looks like text, but that's hardly the file format's fault.

It really is a problem with PDF that it's too easy to get a file where copy and paste yields a different result than what's displayed. But this varies widely with the software used for creating the file (e.g. latex ligatures never work in copy-paste)

Have you seen the spec for .doc and .xls ?

That's something that should be pushed by the developer community, I think. Perhaps having an HTML client for people who nowadays use PDF writers and readers, with the option to tag data in some easily parseable format (if the data isn't already coming in a table).

This should output a single file and ideally it should have some way of ensuring the author it won't be modified unnoticed (that's one of the features common people use PDF for, today, they think it is something no one can modify) -- perhaps signing it with a key from Keybase would work in the mid term.

https://github.com/iffy/lhtml has something going in this direction.

I've had similar experiences, as well as worse; one PDF I got from a bank about my student loans a year or so back had ostensibly only text content, but none of it was even able to be selected.