I could say all the same things about text files or JPGs. PDF is not the "lowest common denominator". That would be the format that can be most easily convert

I could say all the same things about text files or JPGs. PDF is not the "lowest common denominator". That would be the format that can be most easily converted to other formats. With text and images, I can easily create PDFs and documents in myriad other formats. Alas, PDFs do not convert as easily to other formats. To this day, no one has a PDF-to-text converter that is 100% reliable in preserving the proper line lengths. Not even a company with Google's resources.