[contrarian1234]

Are there any real alternatives?

I tried to make a conference poster with SVG - using Inkscape - and it was minor disaster that rendered differently in different programs/browsers, with some features entirely broken

but I don't know of a third option..

[epc]

IBM tried to push a competitor in the 1990s…BookManager was an initially mainframe (VM/CMS, MVS, etc) combination of viewer program and proprietary format. It came about in response to both IBM customers and product documentation groups demanding some sort of online “hypertext” version of the thousands of publications available.

IIRC it came out around the same time as the initial Acrobat format but not necessarily in response to it. Eventually there were viewers for Windows, OS/2. It wasn't particularly bad, but it was very literal in display and Acrobat/PDF rapidly left it in the dust.

When the web boomed in 1995–1996 the product group behind BookManager tried to ban distribution of PDFs by other IBM groups but failed. One of the problems with BookManager formatted files is you had to recreate the appropriate record format if you transferred it back to a mainframe, and I vaguely recall EBCDIC vs ASCII issues (where PDF is, I think, UTF native?).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCRIPT_(markup)#BookManager

[signaru]

Microsoft tried with XPS which is a zipped XML format, pretty much like MS Office 2007+ files. To Adobe's credit, they made PDF an open standard around the time XPS came out. Maybe it's a combination of being there first, many files already in PDF, and finally making the format open which made PDF win.

[mdaniel]

The LOC's write-up is informative, I think: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd0005...

They do say "please don't" as far as their "LC preference"[1] but then later in the document have nice things to say about the format being just .zip and .xml so its introspection and recovery options are much larger than "welp, hope pdf2text still exists in 2040"

1: they have a Recommended Formats Statement: https://www.loc.gov/preservation/resources/rfs/ which currently is published in html and pdf with a "Get Adobe Reader" button on the page, which I feel is dangerously misguided advice

[martin_a]

Well, this is exactly why PDF was invented and is doing its job so well. To preserve a desired layout and very specific information on how something has to be outputted.

That comes with downsides, yes, but at its core it's just working fine.

edit: Third option would be to render your content as an image, but that comes with its own downsides.

[contrarian1234]

expect I don't feel many programs are working in PDF natively except for Adobe products. It's always just an export target, or you "print to PDF"

So to me it kinda looks like the format is lacking

I also don't know much about it, but I assume it's not easy to generate programmatically. While for instance generating an SVG diagram/image is generally pretty trivial

[FuriouslyAdrift]

There's DVI (device independent file format) from TeX

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Device_independent_file_format

[anthk]

DJVU, but it's raster I think.