> Why not ePUB

ePUB is notoriously bad at displaying mathematics. It also takes away the author's control of the page layout. To me there is nothing more satisfying than a well-crafted PDF.

Yes!

And maybe someone can write some Machine Learning tool to "unformat" the PDF into ePUB.

I agree.

Was very surprised that most academic documents aren't being published in DjVu [0] format anymore, very sad.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DjVu

If it was epub or tex, the first thing I would do is look for a way to make a pdf out of it.

One nice upside to having tex source is that you can set the page size to match e.g., a phone screen. Reading standard pdf textbooks and papers on a phone isn’t very fun.

I used to do this for reading arxiv preprints, but the script I wrote was kind of brittle and it doesn’t really work out with figures anyway

Honestly if the scientific community moved to something that could be interactive and reflowable I would be so happy

I want markdown for academics. Mermaid markdown comes close. Needs charts.

ar5iv[0] is great for reading on mobile

[0]: https://ar5iv.labs.arxiv.org

Sure, it's easy. But it's hard the other way around.

It's similar to publishing a binary program with or without source code.

I'm fairly certain that PDF was generated using LaTeX, everyone in academia uses it. Besides, it's not fair to complain about formatting in a very early draft.

Why complain?