"They only support static layouts - not fluid/dynamic layouts that change when you resize the page. Don't have support for features like video, animated images, interactive charts."
these things are features in a lot of contexts.
these things are features in a lot of contexts.
I’m trying to read documents on my screen 99% of the time, not print them, so I couldn’t care less about some hypothetical paper page size they’re tying me to.
Regarding videos: PDFs support these too, and more – including scripting and 3D models!
Outside of that, PDFs are "hard" to edit (unintentionally) so for a quote or invoice I know you're seeing what I sent you. I've never had a PDF "updated" by a manager on my side, or yours.
And yeah, ultimately, they're often printed if they're legal or accounting.
If we want a format that prints terribly, but is great onscreen, and contains links, we already have that in HTML. If we want permanence and exact printing, we already have that in PDF.
I don't think it would be impossible to e.g. extend a variant of HTML (and ePub already supports this to some extent, I believe) to have a more stable print output (e.g. fixed pagination and page number hints) for when it's required, while still allowing reflowing, proper text search.
That's actually another pain point: PDFs is really a vector graphics format, so any text search is by necessity some more or less horrible heuristic layered on that. I work with a certain large company's PDF specifications every day, and they literally can't be searched in most PDF viewers, since the spaces between words seem to be done in a way not accessible to the heuristics of the readers, so everything is one large string to them.
If you want to cite a figure X from chapter Y, then cite figure X from chapter Y.
These aren't impossible problems. A well formatted index or table of contents gets you most of the way there.
But what if we used some sort of immutable reference? We could add new reference locations after some fixed amount of content such that they're never too far away, and we could even print these references at the bottom of each section for ease of use!
How does HTML hinder this?
Relying on your business partners or colleagues not knowing how to do this seems risky: If you can’t trust them, I’d personally use PDF signatures or at least hashes of the entire file.
I can't remember a single non-fiction epub that was better than or even equal to the PDF.
But anything remotely technical with code snippets, diagrams, screenshots, tables, etc, PDF is going to be infinitely better.
Javascript is not part of any document, and PDF does not have the equivalent - Printed pages don't change.