alt Hacker NewsPDFs should be only for printing or maybe for keeping scanned versions of things. For anything else they're just not the right tool for the job. Not for things meant to be accessed on a computer like books, scientific papers or, for some weird reason, catalogs and price lists from websites.
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.
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I don't know, I really love a well-typeset books/papers. Especially when they feature figures that are deliberately placed close to the relevant section in the text, it's just not something we can replicate with HTML, that can barely do proper justified text.
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.
EPUB is the ebook standard, outside of Amazon-land, so it has staying power in its space. I think it would be good for the ecosystem if it broke containment and got tooling in enough places to challenge PDF.
Interesting point. What do you feel about the "business world"'s heavy use of PDFs? There is something to be said about the file format being trusted/so dominant now... probably some random sequence of events led to this happening... but perhaps hard to shift
A PDF of a long document such as a standard or reference manual is almost always preferable to an HTML version. HTML versions have issues with formatting, searching (as browsers struggle with multi-thousand page documents and non-native search document search implementations almost always suck), indexing, correct behavior on windows size change (especially a side-by-side pdf view is almost unheard of for webpages), ... . Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me.
slighlty disagree with this. A fixed page layout has it's own advantages. The reason we have more high quality pdf readers than epub readers is probrably connected to the format itself. PDF readers usally are more more feature complete when it comes to stuff like annotations too.