An HTML document can be plain text, and the sorts of documents you're referring to should be. I didn't say I wanted _websites!_ I just want content in a simple text-based format, not an inflexible more-or-less-binary blob.

> I make PDF files all the time with my scanner

In a hypothetical world without PDFs, wouldn't images work just as well for this? It's not like scanners are creating the same typographic layout etc. as a publisher needs to do when they send documents _to_ a printer?