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Web standards fix many of the problems. So why are PDFs still used, particularly for publishing reports?
1: https://www.nngroup.com/articles/pdf-unfit-for-human-consump...
The lack of changing on mobile is technically a feature.
And once the old paper based process has been "made electronic" by using PDF's, they don't bother with trying to continue past a "sheet of paper" metaphor.
Why are you saying this like it's a bad thing? Why would you want dynamic content in a document format?
You can't give someone an epub and tell them to read page 197. You can't look at a webpage and know how it will look when you print it out. You also can't just netcat an ebook to your printer and get useful output.
What alternatives do we really have? PDF is the most widely supported format outside of plain text (arguably more widely supported than text actually, with phones being the major computing device). I haven't seen an ebook format that can correctly and consistently deal with code sections, inline images, quotes, font styling, paging, etc (maybe more a software issue than format problem, but if nobody can make it work right, the format isn't blameless).
Thus, PDF was a game changer. Basically, no matter what machine you opened the file on it would look exactly the same. It kinda sucks you can't edit it or have to use special tools to parse it but when it comes to readability across devices it cant be beat.
Posting papers from arXiv to HN I have a choice of pointing to the HTML abstract or the PDF and overall people express preference for the PDF and I believe I get more upvotes for the PDF.
I can see a phone being a little too small though. PDF does have features that make it possible to make a PDF which is reflowable like an HTML document for the sake of accessibility and better UX, but those features are complicated as hell and rarely used.
Personally I love reading PDF files on my iPad (or cheap Android tablet for that matter.) I can load 100 books and even more technical papers and read them on the bus, spinning at the gym, in bed, curled up on the couch, as a passenger in my car, etc. Posting papers from arXiv to HN I have a choice of pointing to the HTML abstract or the PDF and overall people express preference for the PDF and I believe I get more u…
I also have a rule about reading PDFs. I almost universally print them off to actual paper if it's more than 2-3 pages worth of content. Printing websites is a non-starter.
Word/excel/powerpoint all do whatever they want.