It is impressive but...it really feels like those are the details that really really matter.
I don't have any love for PDF, but I'm actually not sure what's more cross-platform. Any browser will render PDF, so everyone already has a viewer on their computer. A browser will also print any document to PDF, and many other editors can export to PDF (though perhaps not import for editing)
It can't be replaced by an Office format, like docx, because even today apps like Pages can't render MS Office docs correctly half the time.
Doesn't seem like HTML would fly, either, given all the kinds of things that get embedded into PDF.
> Doesn't seem like HTML would fly, either, given all the kinds of things that get embedded into PDF.
That's ironic. Browser PDF readers, at least open source ones, render PDFs as HTML using javascript. At least I'm sure about FF because I just checked that text from a native-digital pdf showed up in the DOM in developer tools.
What's the obsession with "looking the same everywhere"?
Page references: this shouldn't be a thing. Academia has already solved this problem for notable texts. Rather than nearly uncountable numbers of paragraphs that all run together, paragraphs or short sections or lines are numbered. See any good edition of Plato or Aristotle, or just about any notable play or longer poem ever translated. Relying on a single published layout of a work to reference is dumb.
Citing exact line numbers isn't even necessary for native-language works. When they're digital, search works. It works even better in flowed-format texts than it does in pdfs, which sometimes, depending on how the pdf was constructed, won't match text properly across newlines.
Visual quality: As long as images—data, charts, graphs, photographs—are not degraded beyond usefulness, the actual text, and its display, is up to the reader application. Everyone uses the web complete with mathjax, and those doesn't have Knuth-approved formatting in every respect. But they're good enough, and they work everywhere on every device without squinting or pinch to zoom. There are some people who insist on putting pre-rendered images of math in html, and they always look worse, because they don't match the text without a lot of work to have extra high-res images that are auto-scaled according to viewport and surrounding font size—work that I bet not many people have ever done in the history of html publishing.
I look at pdfs on my phone all the time, it's great. 'Optimized for mobile' usually means oversized fonts and a shitty UI so I get RSI in my thumb from endless scrolling.
PDF is kind of an ugly format, but the problem with realtime text flow etc. is that designers are (at the behest of clients) are always trying to look visually distinct and as a result nothing is standardized or predictable at the rendering end. 95% of digital layout is ass compared to the print version.
Or, as I like to call it, SOUNDYMAREHEATRONER.
