alt Hacker NewsInteresting 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
Because the business world used to run on paper, and pdf became the de facto standard desktop publishing file format because Adobe became the de facto king of desktop publishing. Storing, transferring, and reading documents on paper has given way for doing all of that digitally, but path dependency guarantees that there’s no way of getting rid of PDF now.
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.