But now? Publishers, even independent self publishers, have overwhelmingly never left PDF as output of choice, as it is superior in terms of typography, consistency and layout. Take any (non-Print Replica; i.e., reflowable) Kindle book that has just a few logical symbols, and you’ll see they soon become sufficiently ugly to be distracting, and in some cases just unclear due to poor typography. I celebrate projects such as MathJax, but what is sad is that 30 years on MathJax should be necessary at all, and here the typography is better but still doesn’t feel completely natural as in PDF documents.
And from a practical, layman’s standpoint, now that we’re all becoming “mobile first”, while it’s natural to complain when a web link points to a PDF file, the resulting app makes the experience more immersive and self-contained, enabling any average user to save that document. Just saving an HTML document with all its linked material using your phone requieres a l337 browser, Evernote, Notion, or wget from a terminal emulator with the right flags... undoubtedly it’s a chore. I agree this is all sad, but by now I don’t see this changing anytime soon.
And from a practical, layman’s standpoint, now that we’re all becoming “mobile first”, while it’s natural to complain when a web link points to a PDF file, the resulting app makes the experience more immersive and self-contained, enabling any average user to save that document. Just saving an HTML document with all its linked material using your phone requieres a l337 browser, Evernote, Notion, or wget from a terminal emulator with the right flags... undoubtedly it’s a chore. I agree this is all sad, but by now I don’t see this changing anytime soon.