One of the downsides to the formats (including PDF) currently used in academia is that their layout and typography is fixed by the author, and optimized for pri

One of the downsides to the formats (including PDF) currently used in academia is that their layout and typography is fixed by the author, and optimized for printing. You can't reflow the text for the screen unless you have the original source document. For example, most papers use multiple columns. This optimizes for readability when printed in A4/Letter, but on a computer screen it's much harder to scan and read pages this way, compared to a strictly linear layout -- especially when the text is interspersed with graphs and tables. Another example: Paragraphs are usually signaled with a line break and an indent. Papers seldom use any spacing between paragraphs. I think indented paragraphs work well for fiction, less so for academic texts. The papers mentioned in this thread by dfc are good examples of those two problems.