Right, but somehow it gets used for all sorts of things that are never printed in offices everywhere.

It gets printed to the screen for reading and still retains the text for searching. The ability to easily edit can actually be liability in many situations.

Its literally a replacement for paper documents, except you can search and view them on a computer and still hit print and get a great paper reproduction.

Word processing/editing has so much more going on, PDF actually removes features from postscript for security purposes, nobody wants to be sending word docs around just for viewing.

Recovering coherent text strings from PDF is non-trivial. Paragraphs are merely implicit and hyphenation must be removed, among many other problems. Anything unusual like sub/superscripts or inline math will potentially end up as gibberish or missing.

I have spent weeks on an algorithm that would recreate words and paragraphs from letter rectangles and the space in between. Fun, fun, fun. Tables are even better. Page headers and footers then complete the insanity nicely.

That has a lot to do with the program that created it, HTML can be bad to search to I mean try and index a react page.

It a better situation than OCRing a paper doc though.

The alternative doesn’t have to be a word doc; I’d prefer, open office xml docs, google docs, markdown, and just plain old rich text half the time. The other half of use cases, graphically rich report-like things, HTML or a power point would have been better. I don’t want my content to be constrained to a paper format to be zoomed and scrolled around on a not-paper-sized screen with no support for reflows.