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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

An alternative thesis - PDFs fit a world view where the highest objective of a document is to be read by a human.

If I am given something that I am personally expected to read thoroughly - be it a report, long-form article, slide deck, etc - then the most professional format by far is a LaTeX PDF.

I can only claim anything beyond personal experience but if I want to signal to someone that a document is important and was written with care then they are getting a PDF.

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The thing is, human consumption tend to rely on machine consumption. We want search engines to index our documents, and we want to be able to search within the documents. These features rely on machine parsability.

It is perfectly possible to generate a PDF file with none of the issues mentioned, the problem is that most people don't have the required control of their toolchain, and a lot of tools will create such issues by default.

A LaTeX-generated PDF along with the .tex file used to generate it solves all the problems mentioned by the parent. Now to convince casual users that LaTeX is worth learning... that's a completely different problem.

Not true, I've seen the most abhorrent pdfs generated by latex in academia. When I was working in the digitization department of a public university library we realized that we need to handle pdf just like every other scanned page, rasterize then OCR.

That doesn't make sense. In the case of a PDF+Tex bundle you just run the TeX through Pandoc and you have a neat result. Why would you OCR the PDF when you can just the raw markup?

Because a.) almost no Latex document is published as Pdf+Tex, it's either PDF or die, and b.) latex has a bazillion Turing-complete extensions, that don't make sense semantically until you render them.

Yet, for a visually impaired, PDFs are a nightmare because of what is cited up above.

So PDFs are the Mercedes Benz of document formats?

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