I had the exact opposite reaction. I’m reading this on an iPhone SE2020, and I MUCH appreciate reading this in pdf form. I didn’t have to pan back and forth or even put the phone in landscape orientation. This is one of the smallest smartphones you can still buy, and the experience of PDF is WAY better than the user-hostile auto-flow text forced down mobile users’ throats.

I was skeptical at first, but I think the author made the point fantastically well.

What.

Your browser has a zoom functionality that lets you make the text smaller, essentially replicating the PDF site above. Only the opposite of what you say is correct: I can’t read that PDF’s text without turning my phone into landscape and picking up my glasses.

To get equally small text on my desktop I have to turn the font size all the way down to 7. God forbid you have readers with less than stellar eyesight.

I get what they're going for but the PDF is not exactly an accessible reading experience.

I’m using a 2016 iPhone SE, and it’s largely unreadable without being very up close.

EPUB would beat the shit out of PDF for that.

(EPUB is basically a subset of HTML with client-oriented context.)

PDF is size-agnostic. There's nothing to stop you from creating documents the size of a phone screen.

I’m commenting here as a user reading a PDF. The fact that someone else could have laid it out differently doesn’t change the fixed layout of the PDF that I’m trying to read.

There’s a reason responsive design has been a big deal for the last 10+ years and I don’t think the benefits of PDF are worth throwing it out.

As someone who really detests responsive design, the lack of it in a PDF strikes me as a feature, not a bug.