pshaw.

right now, today, tuesday june 13th, 2017, safari will not open a .pdf to a specific page or bookmark, neither on the desktop nor in ios.

chrome can. firefox can. but safari cannot. which means neither the iphone nor the ipad can do it.

imagine if -- on the web -- you couldn't deep-link to an anchor in the middle of a webpage, but merely to (the top of) the webpage itself.

that's not the only deficiency of the .pdf format. it's not even the most galling one. it's just the one that happens to be hamstringing a certain project of mine at the moment. and it's illustrative.