"Secure documents" is a whole 'nother ball of wax, and has no bearing on this specific question. PDFs themselves address that use-case poorly as well.
My (and others') point is and remains that a spatially-fixed layout does serve a useful purpose for some documents. Including the 140 million or so published books and an even larger count of formatted published articles.
Yes, for short texts, dynamic flow within an HTML webpage is useful. Yes, for very small devices, virtually any format sucks and blows (this is a device problem, not an inherent PDF problem).
I'm not a fan of websites that dump what should be Web-formatted content as PDFs. But I'm also not a fan of the notion that everything should be an HTML document either.
(I've used various online document formats for going on 40 years, from raw ASCII (or EBCDIC) through roff/nroff/troff/groff, HTML, LaTeX, various flavours of Markdown, etc. I've hand typed out several books simply to have a suitable online digital format of them (I hope this serves to indicate my level of obsessiveness, if not sanity, on this topic). I'm a huge fan of Pandoc and its ability to take a standard markup format and produce a wide range of output endpoints (usually: PDF, ePub, HTML, plain ASCII text, though a few others may be included).
I'm also a recent convert to large-format eBook readers. And from that experience I can make two specific observations:
1. The behaviour of HTML and web browsers on an eInk device really sucks. Pagination and not triggering scroll actions with the merest suggestion of a hint of breathing on the surface is hugely underappreciated.
2. PDFs (or equivalent paginated documents, e.g., DJVU) offer an excellent reading experience on such devices.
I'm not a huge fan of the PDF file format, mind, it's far too variable and has too many surprises and vulnerabilities. As a reading medium, however, it's quite good, especially when produced with competent tools.
My (and others') point is and remains that a spatially-fixed layout does serve a useful purpose for some documents. Including the 140 million or so published books and an even larger count of formatted published articles.
Yes, for short texts, dynamic flow within an HTML webpage is useful. Yes, for very small devices, virtually any format sucks and blows (this is a device problem, not an inherent PDF problem).
I'm not a fan of websites that dump what should be Web-formatted content as PDFs. But I'm also not a fan of the notion that everything should be an HTML document either.
(I've used various online document formats for going on 40 years, from raw ASCII (or EBCDIC) through roff/nroff/troff/groff, HTML, LaTeX, various flavours of Markdown, etc. I've hand typed out several books simply to have a suitable online digital format of them (I hope this serves to indicate my level of obsessiveness, if not sanity, on this topic). I'm a huge fan of Pandoc and its ability to take a standard markup format and produce a wide range of output endpoints (usually: PDF, ePub, HTML, plain ASCII text, though a few others may be included).
I'm also a recent convert to large-format eBook readers. And from that experience I can make two specific observations:
1. The behaviour of HTML and web browsers on an eInk device really sucks. Pagination and not triggering scroll actions with the merest suggestion of a hint of breathing on the surface is hugely underappreciated.
2. PDFs (or equivalent paginated documents, e.g., DJVU) offer an excellent reading experience on such devices.
I'm not a huge fan of the PDF file format, mind, it's far too variable and has too many surprises and vulnerabilities. As a reading medium, however, it's quite good, especially when produced with competent tools.