[aynyc]

Many reasons. In finance, PDF reports are passed between companies instead of JSON/XML, etc.. because:

1. PDF is considered tempered proof. Obviously, not true, but legal is ok with that.

2. PDF can be reviewed quickly by non-technical folks, and then parsed and store into databases.

3. PDF is flat file that can be archived easily per legal, other formats such as word documents are used for that as well.

In a sense, PDF is what people want. Structured data is what machines want.

[n0rlant1s]

Shouldn't both exist? I.e. PDF for the human and data for the machine?

[aynyc]

Each report costs money. People don't want to pay extra for the same data.

[n0rlant1s]

But they want to pay extra for expensive OCR software to parse it out instead?

[aynyc]

It's one time fee and it's probably used in other places.

[6510]

printers love pdf