We have responsive and open standards like HTML and EPUB (zipped XTML) and they work great. arXiv has HTML papers, and libgen and anna's archive often have EPUB versions of books. The issue for me with EPUB is the lack of good readers now.
I haven't had a need to use annotations. I guess that could be solved by EPUB editors, but I haven't tested any, apart from any text editors after unzipping the EPUB.
Even some of the okay ones, most are, as tantacurl may say, janky.
Sure, I would like that beautifully designed page to magically become a single column beautiful document on my phone, but I will take the former over a badly designed text extract where the relevant figure is 10 pages away.
Epub (=html) is good for novels, but there is nothing replacing PDF for science papers. If anything, the latex (or ideally typst) source would come the closest, if properly written (not absolute offsets). That could be used to produce different page sized versions.
For justified text - what's the point of stretching each line artificially just so they align at the end? It looks awful to me even when done "correctly". Having uneven spaces makes it harder to read. Having every line align on the right also makes it harder to read. When you have uneven lines, I subconsciously use the different at the end as an anchor for where I am in the text or where a certain phrase was. Hyphenating words is another thing that doesn't make a lot of sense nowadays - we have enough words with a hyphen naturally in them, so reading a broken up word is mentally taxing as I have to figure out if it's a normal word with a hyphen or a broken up one.
All the arXiv HTML papers are much better to read in the browser, IMO. And they'll only get better. PDF will likely stay the same.
For small screens like phones or tablets, having to constantly scroll up and down and left and right for a 2-column paper is just painful. PDF is much better on a big screen.
You will realize that saying "PDFs should be only for printing" is a vast oversimplifcation for the requirements people have for different kinds of documents.
Purely psychologically, I think there’s something that feels more "secure" or long-lasting about PDF’s perceived quasi-immutability compared to formats designed to be edited.
Except the PDF is not responsive at all and you can't increase or decrease the font size without increasing the whole width of page.
> Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me.
HTML shouldn't mean online-only. If the vendor isn't trying to make it hard to download, you should always be able to convert to PDF. But PDF to HTML is very hard or impossible.
You only want to do an overall proportional zoom, when needed.
A well-designed document page has appropriate size ratios between various kinds of texts, formulae, tables and images, which should not be corrupted by changing the size of a single element.
The pages where the author has not formatted them adequately are ugly and hard to understand, which is what you typically see when this kind of content is written as HTML/EPUB documents, which are rendered non-deterministically.
Lazy writers may like HTML, but readers who must read and search through vast amounts of technical documentation do not like it.
There are many good PDF readers that are adequate for reading and searching even huge documents, but I have never seen any tool that works acceptably for EPUB/HTML big documents, which is not surprising because no tool can compensate the fact that the writer of the document did not design the layout of the pages carefully.
No two readers render them alike, and they typically are much uglier and more difficult to use than books (sometimes even the same book) in PDF, DJVU or ODT formats.
I read a very large quantity of technical documentation and I always avoid EPUB and HTML like the plague. I use such formats only when there is no alternative.
On Linux, mupdf is a decent EPUB reader, which is very fast and it usually does a better job at formatting pages than most other EPUB readers that I have tried on Linux.
For fast navigation and searching, especially in technical documentation with hundreds or thousands of pages, it is very useful for the document to be well partitioned into pages and the page layouts to be well designed, like for a printed book, even if this may seem unnecessary for a document stored in a computer.
HTML and EPUB documents are seldom divided in uniform pages and the position of various elements, like tables or figures can vary between readers or even with the same reader in different circumstances, so when you search various things you are slowed down in recognizing them, because they may not be in the position where you have seen them previously. Moreover, in HTML and EPUB documents, depending on the reader, the size ratios between various elements may be inappropriate, making the pages ugly and/or hard to understand.
All the defects of HTML and EPUB documents are caused by the fact that the writer of the document normally does not take full responsibility for the appearance of the pages, delegating this to the browsers/readers, which seldom do a good job for scientific/technical documents full of formulae, tables and figures.
This may be fine for normal Web pages, but it is not acceptable for technical and scientific documents.
In theory, one could design carefully HTML pages and the associated CSS files, to be rendered deterministically, but I have encountered very rarely such documents.
> the size ratios between various elements may be inappropriate
I can't recall having this issue on websites or on EPUBs. What kinds of elements are we talking about? HTML and CSS are pretty good at keeping sizes from what I've seen. I agree that there are many EPUB readers, most of them very unpolished. And perhaps there aren't EPUB readers that are good at everything, yet.
For formulas, MathML and other tech has been satisfactory. I was able to find this basic math paper arXiv uses as a demo for their HTML papers:
https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org/html/1910.06709
It doesn't have figures, but the math is rendered perfectly. I can easily remove the "justify" style and increase and decrease the letters. If it was a long paper, it would've been nice to have a clickable ToC, but most EPUBs have one.
I think that right now most EPUB readers and some HTML renderings are bad, but I believe they'll get better.
The way how the "printed" pages look in Firefox and Chrome demonstrates the same rendering problems that appear in most EPUB readers.
I have no idea which is the cause of this, but the bad behavior of "printing" in Firefox and Chrome has existed for years. Not all browsers behave the same, e.g. Vivaldi usually is much better at generating "printed" pages, than Chrome, despite being derived from the same code base.
Perhaps the great differences between on-screen rendering and "printed" rendering is caused by the fact that badly designed HTML/CSS might specify some sizes in "pixels" or other such inappropriate units, instead of using length units, like points, inches or millimeters. Then when rendering on different media the size ratios are corrupted.
