I am outside academia but I read a lot of papers. For most people outside I suspect the biggest problem is paywalls and not format. If you don't read a paper be

I am outside academia but I read a lot of papers. For most people outside I suspect the biggest problem is paywalls and not format. If you don't read a paper because it is a PDF and not HTML then you weren't really interested. With chrome, it is not even an annoyance as when you had to load adobe. One reason for PDFs is as you mentioned, latex to HTML results are typically poor. Diagrams are another difficulty that don't have an easy HTML solution. Other reasons I prefer PDFs are: though I never print, I often save papers to disk since I don't always find the paper when I go searching the second time (especially if it is months or even years after), there is a real benefit to being able to read a paper offline - I don't always have a connection to the net when I want to read and lastly, if you have an ereader such as the kindle, pdfs render well on them.