> 1. Linear and limiting Perfect for information discovery. Rich annotations and hypermedia features (external links, document-internal links, TOC) in PDF fix

> 1. Linear and limiting Perfect for information discovery. Rich annotations and hypermedia features (external links, document-internal links, TOC) in PDF fix pretty much all issues stemming from this. All searchable (if the PDF has been constructed properly). Permanent, static structure vs everchanging, confusing messes of websites. The web is NOT QUOTABLE and unusable without advanced full-text search. Barely an URI remains stable. > 2. Jarring user experience. PDFs look completely different from typical web pages. Typesetting on the web is a clusterfuck. Subpar microtype. Font rendering issues galore, tens of versions of popular fonts purchased at different points in time from different vendors with differently messed up CSS font configuration settings. Fonts are not embedded, but hyperlinked. I want a maximum fidelity reading experience for large portions of text and classic formats, because familiarity aids navigating a complex document. There is no need for fancy styles and whatnot. > 3. Slow to load. Renderers differ in quality and speed. PDFs render lightning fast at acceptable settings and if you wanna tune for maximum quality, you can do so at the expense of slower rendering. Besides, it took 2.401ms to load the web page these points are writteen on, excluding content blocked by ublock origin. This point is delusional. A 700 page beautifully typeset PDF opens and renders in <<1s on my 7 year old laptop, and my reader will prerender pages to speed up navigation even more. > 4. Stuffed with fluff. The entire paragraph is invalid because PDF has all those features. > However, in PDFs, those techniques aren’t always used and content creators tend to favor quantity of content over quality and formatting. The same goes for most web content put out today. > 5. Cause disorientation. Because PDFs aren’t web pages, they don’t show a standard navigation like a website would. Document structure is clearly presented in tree on the right side if the PDF is properly annotated/hyperlinked and the reader has a TOC view (productivity tooling should have this). Websites lack this discoverability almost always, and if they have it, it looks different and works differently everywhere, creating disorientation. > 6. Unnavigable content masses. This has nothing to do with PDF and everything to do with the reader in use. A semantic desktop would index all file content, allow cross-linking between files using file:// or other protocols, and generally expose all content to a local or internet search engine. Google search indexes PDFs just fine! (Again, a badly constructed PDF may not contain text at all or broken text, but that's a generation problem.) > 7. Sized for paper, not screens. This is correct, and an advantage, because the web and most other screen content lack the fidelity of typesetting systems like LaTeX, ConTeXt, InDesign etc which each incorporate decades of digital best practice, and several decades more of typesetting knowledge. It is an disadvantage in special settings, like on mobile, but even then, PDF text can be reflowed with appropriate software. > Users Strongly Dislike PDFs It's my favourite format for archiving documents, knowledge, and even website printouts.