> It doesn’t adapt to screen sizes
That is a feature. I expect my PDFs to display with pixel-perfect consistency everywhere.
There are other formats that adapt to screen sizes. HTML is good for that, if we ignore how people break that with styling.
It’s fine for that purpose but it’s terrible for eBooks, manuals, science papers and a lot of other stuff it’s used for. Some HTML with everything in one file would be much better in my opinion. Something like CHM maybe which MS used to use for help files.
You just described the ePub format. It’s a ZIP file with HTML docs in it.
In short, I don't think we could have typeset these grammars without PDF.
We also did a grammar of Dhivehi, which is the only language in the world that uses the Thaana script. Thaana can be typeset quite easily--if you happen to have the right font. Most people don't. I guess the same thing holds if you happen to be publishing grammars of languages that used cuneiform--not many computer systems have cuneiform fonts!
I worked with archivists on a few projects and never appreciated the dumpster fire that electronic documents presented.
PDF is an amazing thing as you get an expressive format that preserves look, feel and content and will likely do so for the foreseeable future. Just the fact that the US Federal courts standardized on PDF for most filings will ensure that it is a viable format for decades or more.
It's a great WORM format. Every added feature makes it worse.
There are great systems for those already.
When I want a PDF, it's because I want a format that I know is always going to look the same.
A PDF is a great archive format. It's perfect for a scan of a document, or a printout.
I never want my viewer to add anything to it, I never want it to detect anything, I never want it to adjust anything.
Just render it exactly the same way, every time.
I worked on a project where we were digitizing and cataloging various records. It was less challenging to do this with papers from the British colonial administration from the late 1700s, than to decipher certain 1980s documents written with a defunct word processor. PDF is a compromise that helps address that issue.
I would not recommend maintaining your general ledger in a PDF. But an annual report that may be referenced for decades is a great example of why a PDF is a useful format.
PDFs are often display focused and difficult to parse, but it’s certainly possible to do so.
It’s success in the market as compared to a edit focused format like ODF underlined how important display consistency is.
But in general, if you generate the PDF with an authoring tool like LaTeX or InDesign, or if you print to PDF from a webpage or document, it's going to be selectable in a sensible way.