[halomru]

People purposefully disallowing copy-paste isn't a problem with PDF: in other formats they would have embedded a picture, at least with PDF you get the other advantages of proper text: infinite zoom and great compression. Sadly there's also a lot of PDFs that are little more than a picture collection that looks like text, but that's hardly the file format's fault.

It really is a problem with PDF that it's too easy to get a file where copy and paste yields a different result than what's displayed. But this varies widely with the software used for creating the file (e.g. latex ligatures never work in copy-paste)

[fiatjaf]

When the PDF is a picture collection that looks like text that's when PDF is being used correctly, because that's when something was scanned out of paper and put on a paper-like format for computers, PDF.

When people write text and data and tables on the computer then put it on a paper-like format to share that's when the problem happens.

[maxxxxx]

Have you ever actually tried to parse PDF with software? It's a sheer nightmare. PDF often gets produced from text processors that have very rich format information. PDF strips it all out and then you somehow have to recreate it.