PDF

Why the PDF Is Secretly the World's Most Important File Formatvice

Against PDF

PDF: Still Unfit for Human Consumption, 20 Years Later (HN)

From https://practicaltypography.com/why-theres-no-e-book-or-pdf.html by Matthew Butterick:

"PDF started as a proprietary Adobe file format, but it eventually became an open standard. Today, writers can make PDFs with many tools; readers can view PDFs in many ways. That’s all good.

What’s bad are the limitations of the format itself. PDF is fundamentally a digital simulation of paper. So it’s great for making paper documents available in the digital realm. But for natively digital documents—like this one—it removes functionality and imposes design constraints.

Thus, as a format for digital books, I have to vote against PDF. As a typographer, that’s painful, because PDF preserves layout and typography better than the typical e-book formats. In all other respects, however, it’s an example of the Shirky Principle—a backward-looking format that wants to impose yesterday’s constraints on today’s projects. As a reader and writer, that’s not good enough."