3 ms·

I guess these are the reasons I was looking for. Thanks for taking the time to deal with my noob question. Upvoted! My next question is that why isn't it possi

• leephillips 4y ago
  I don’t think it’s a question of standards. It’s more that HTML and PDF are different things that solve different problems. PDF is supposed to be a static document that looks exactly the same in every compliant PDF reader. A correctly built PDF with have every glyph that it uses embedded, for example. It’s archival, in the sense that it will always look the same, in all future versions of PDF readers. HTML is markup that describes the author’s intentions to the browser. The reader can use his or her own fonts and have other preferences. The text might reflow to fit screens of various sizes. I can read it on my terminal with lynx. You can embed all kinds of resources from the network. One can take heroic measures¹ to force an exact rendering, but, in my opinion, that’s a dead end that hacks a markup system to do what it’s not intended to do. PDF works great on the web; we don’t need to force HTML to replicate its abilities. It already has hyperlinks, and we can seemlessly navigate bewteen PDF and HTML pages in the browser. [1] https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX https://github.com/coolwanglu/pdf2htmlEX