PostScript is built-in to high-end printing hardware and PDF does a good job at encapsulating PostScript which gives you high reliability that the thing on the

PostScript is built-in to high-end printing hardware and PDF does a good job at encapsulating PostScript which gives you high reliability that the thing on the screen is going to print out the same way that it appears on the screen. Adobe has traditionally had a dominant role in both font (Type 1, OTF) technology and licensing and creative tools (Illustrator - a .ai file is a PDF) and so both the creation and consumption sides of the ecosystem have coalesced around a common format whose semantics carry through predictably (though not simply!) from one end to another. What makes PDF particularly challenging is that there are so many broken PDFs out there which must be tolerated and so many legacy fonts, images and formats which have accumulated in the format over time - JPEG 2000 anybody? Most complaints I see about PDF though are usually “why can’t it just wrap lines” and the answer is that there’s a zillion ways to do that and we’re supposed to be representing the output of that process as a visual artifact, not the input, as HTML does, because the use case is printing and stability of the output is non-negotiable.