Case in point: copy-pasting a paragraph from his PDF-website adds line breaks everywhere. It also loses formatting (bold/italics) and the footnote superscript d

Case in point: copy-pasting a paragraph from his PDF-website adds line breaks everywhere. It also loses formatting (bold/italics) and the footnote superscript doesn't translate. PDF is an open standard, which is freely available2, and stable. It has a version number and many interoperable implementations including free and open source readers and editors. I think ease of copy-pasting is one of the coolest things about the document-centric roots of the web (along with the back button and hyperlinks; in other words, hypertext rules), although the modern web does break it (along with the back button and hyperlinks) in many places, so I can see where he is coming from. PDFs aren't the answer, though.