If you have the source, it's obviously better to use `hlatex`. But PDF is only intended to be a terminal format. In the real world, though, it's very common f

If you have the source, it's obviously better to use `hlatex`. But PDF is only intended to be a terminal format. In the real world, though, it's very common for the 'terminal format' - whether a binary executable or a PDF - to be the only format available. It would be very useful if the toolchains used to produce PDFs - whether `latex`->`dvips`->`ps2pdf` or `pdflatex`, or any of the other possibilities in the extremely complicated TeX ecosystem - did a better job of maintaining the semantic and raw-text content of the source. I would happily increase the size of all my PDFs by a couple percent if it meant I could better extract the contents in the future. I do realize that when you multiply this few percent by many gigabytes of PDFs on archive sites and across many uploads and downloads, it becomes more important, but I would assert that it increases the value of those PDFs by more than it costs.