Even when reading on the phone, I do not understand the complaint against the two-column format.
The one-column format is fine on a large monitor, but on a small phone I prefer narrower columns, because a wide column would either make the text too small or it would require horizontal panning while reading.
So I consider the two-column format as better for phones, not worse.
One of the most complex and battle-tested open source projects is essentially a rendering engine for semantic text that has supported reflowing text to fit the screen for decades. And now you’re seriously considering having to zoom in on a column, then scrolling all the way back up and right to the next column, then down to the footnotes at the bottom, then to a random figure, to be a solution?
Yes, I strongly prefer reading PDF documents with fixed layout instead of HTML or any other formats with reflowing text, including on small phone screens.
I frequently read documents with many thousands of pages, which also contain many figures and tables.
A variable layout, at least for me, makes the browsing and the search through such documents much more difficult.
I have never ever seen any advantage in having the text reflow to match whatever window happens to be temporarily used to display the text, except for ephemeral messages that I will never read again.
For anything that I will read multiple times, I want the text to retain the same layout, regardless of what device or window happens to display it. If necessary, I see no problem in adjusting the window to fit the text, instead of allowing changes in the text, which would interfere with my ability of remembering it from the previous readings.
I really hate those who fail to provide their technical documentation as PDF documents, being content to just have some Web pages with it.
I don't want reflowing text to fit the screen. Text has an optimal number of characters per line, and it's between 40 and 60 depending on who you ask. Lines longer than that hinder reading. Lines shorter than that are just inconvenient.
The usual two-column layout is because having 40 to 60 characters per line in a single column is wasteful of paper. That is a real issue. But the solution is to make the PDF page narrower. Almost nobody prints these documents anyways; there's no good reason they need to conform to legacy sizes like A4 or letter paper commonly found in office printers. Just choose A5 as the size. People who really need to print can fit two A5 pages on one A4 page, and people who view these documents on a phone screen will also find A5 more convenient.
