The purpose of a PDF is to have a document that can be viewed and printed as designed and laid-out by the creator. HTML doesn't do that. The experience of an em

The purpose of a PDF is to have a document that can be viewed and printed as designed and laid-out by the creator. HTML doesn't do that. The experience of an embedded PDF viewer is still pretty horrible (even new browsers have a pretty bad experience, and well, even Adobe Acrobat's UI is just... bizarre). PDF supported embedded type, vector graphics, and many other features long before the web browser could. Honestly, the issue with pdf is how documents are created (often via fake printer drivers that often compile/translate whatever you are printing to some pretty gnarly postscript).