> Doing a more modern website enables a lot of things that PDFs cannot do. Animations, interactivity, better automatic parsing, metadata generation, tracking of

> Doing a more modern website enables a lot of things that PDFs cannot do. Animations, interactivity, better automatic parsing, metadata generation, tracking of changes and versions, easier embedding elsewhere, better referencing and citing (hyperlinks), Perhaps you are not aware that you can create interactive and animated PDFs with LaTeX, beamer, and tikz. Admittedly, it is rarely used. But links inside and outside of a PDF, including additional files, like source code and measured data into the PDF, generating versions of PDFs that show the diff compared to another commit in a version control system, slides that reveal themselves piece by piece are not only possible but actively used in academic circles. Just have look at the PDF of this HN thread for some of those features. Copying parts of a PDF is usually not a problem if it was generated with LaTeX but is often a problem with other generators. > "quality of figures identifies 90% of any paper's merit" Again, see the PDF of this HN thread for nicely formated, syntax highlighted copyable figures, e.g. Fig 2. Do that in a web stack. Of course it is possible, but the best way to do it changes probably quite often and needs a dozen NPM libraries with aforementioned maintenance burden. PDF are offline capable. I can have a directory on my machines or a cloud service of my choosing as a kind of private library. Do that with web pages. It is possible but often more pita than it is worth. I can use local tools for full text search in them. And I will be able to use that when sitting in an airplane or in the middle of a forest. I.e. I can choose where I want to read and consume complicated reads to facilitate my understanding not to optimize wifi coverage. I've had a colleague at university who wrote a multi-hundred page book with around 600 diagrams, all of them where programmed with tikz in LaTeX, you could change centrally the building blocks, colors, line styles, shading, font sizes etc. And all of the diagrams would adapt automatically. While being able to integrate these diagrams with arrows to source code and mathematical formulas. I am not aware of any other tool that can do that reliably. That is an extreme use case and for many simpler use cases LaTeX/PDF is not worth it.