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> They obviously wanted it to be a digital paper, for some reason, and not a data mining source.

"Because it's pretty" is it. 99% of people don't care about text being a data mining source.

The original goal of PDF was to create documents that could "view and print anywhere" (literally the original tagline of the Acrobat project), substantially the same as how the document creator intended them. What Adobe was trying to solve was the problem of sending someone a document that looked a particular way and when they rendered it on their printer or display, it looked different, e.g. having a different number of pages because subtle font differences caused word-wrapping to change the number of lines and thus the page flow. It wasn't about it being "pretty," it was about having functional differences due to local rendering and font availability. In this regard, the format is an emphatic success.

I do wish they had focused a bit more on non-visual aspects such as screen-reader data, but to say the whole point is "because it's pretty" is a bit uncharitable. The format doesn't solve the problem you wish it solved, but it does solve a problem other than making things "pretty."

Alternatively, "the journal only accepts LaTeX."

I quite like PDFs, but this thread has been an eye-opener.

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