Please don't confuse the monstrosities that our poor tools produce with the nice files that our good tools produce. Using a shit PDF from some manufacturers web

Please don't confuse the monstrosities that our poor tools produce with the nice files that our good tools produce. Using a shit PDF from some manufacturers website to criticize the format is like using the HTML produced by Microsoft Word to criticize how shitty HTML is. Remember that PDF is mostly a text format that's pretty simple at its heart. You can actually hand-write a PDF, though it's painful: https://brendanzagaeski.appspot.com/0005.html https://brendanzagaeski.appspot.com/0005.html Take a look at the cli tool QPDF. Once you uncompress each of the dictionaries within the file you can load it up into a text editor and see what is possible. Take a shitty large PDF as an example and then one produced by LaTeX. See the difference. Free tools can and do produce amazing PDFs that are small and quick to render. Honestly, PanDoc is probably the place to start. Both ecosystems — HTML and PDF — are under rampant abuse, I agree. But with PDF we could end up with something better — Not because it's most constraining or more freeing but because we would be doing the hard work of layout once, on the server, not a billion times on our battery and cpu constrained portable devices.