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Comment by sjy | Hacker News Reader

What better technology do you have in mind? HTML? Because as much as I like it, I find myself converting HTML to PDF every now and then so I can annotate, paginate, and yes, print it. PDF isn't perfect, but the art of typesetting is informed by much more than the physical properties of paper. Reducing communication to a static artifact divided into page-sized chunks is a useful feature for scholarly writing. Being able to produce physical copies of a document that you can give away for free, even if most people will read the document on an electronic device requiring a power source, is a feature. Writing static content that really takes advantage of the web's unique features [1] is hard!

[1] https://meltingasphalt.com/interactive/going-critical/

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I’d prefer a format that automatically adjusted things like page and font size to whatever I’m reading on, whether that’s reactive HTML or an ebook format.

And some e-readers do support two column layouts, although it only makes sense if you have a wide screen.

I hate having to pan and scan a PDF file on my phone, and the fixed pagination only makes sense when printed. Even on most desktop screens a letter/a4 page is too long.

I'd like those features too, but unfortunately for reference material I find annotation and pagination more important. Annotation is broken in HTML/EPUB because there's no way to make my annotations portable across devices without vendor lock-in. Pagination is broken because HTML documents rarely contain paragraph numbers or other useful pinpoints, and browsers aren't as good as PDF readers at keeping track of your position in a long document. These are solvable problems, but until they are solved I find HTML unusable for anything that takes more than 15 minutes to read. I suspect that most people who consider PDF obsolete rarely spend that much time on a single document.

Agreed. For anything complicated, I’ll always download the pdf. I don’t really find it burdensome pan and zoom a pdf, even on mobile. It seems to work a lot better than publishers attempts at producing web versions of papers, which I find generally useless.

> reactive HTML or an ebook format

Genuine question but can you think of a website that uses reactive HTML properly and mind sharing it? I find that most websites seem to just put a maximum width on a page and call it a day.

Everybody should be writing and sharing org-mode files.

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