The author focuses too heavily on a useless anti-PDF rant. Why is it a PDF? Because it's better than just sending us the Word file the PDF came from. The PDF

The author focuses too heavily on a useless anti-PDF rant. Why is it a PDF? Because it's better than just sending us the Word file the PDF came from. The PDF file also meets the exact requirements the author is complaining about: "You should have — at your fingertips — immediate, unrestricted digital access to the full text of any piece of legislation the very moment it’s released publicly by Congress." I'm reading the document on my laptop and I can select and copy text from it. How much more "unrestricted digital access" can we get? Sure, the PDF in question doesn't have in-document links to jump to parts. But it has delineated pages. Never underestimate how un-tech-savvy congresspeople currently are. They probably want one authoritative version of their document. For modifications, they probably say "the third paragraph on page 20" for ease of reference [1]. The author ideally wants every thing generated by a government to be handed over on a silken pillow in perfect Legislative DocBook markup with all meta data painstakingly entered and kept up to date. While demanding all information be free is a laudable goal, it would be better to spend effort implementing and backing such plans than screaming at people who don't have a clear path to fix their current shortcomings [2]. [1]: They could use section headings and then reference from there, but that incurs another lookup of "Go to the table of contents, find the page number, go to the page, find the reference" instead of "Turn to page, see reference." [2]: If a clear path to fixing their current shortcomings does exist, please work with them instead of working at them.