[unz]

Slightly off-topic, Pdf and Ps are just plain outdated for today. They're unreadable on small screens and for people with bad eyesight, and no one sane prints stuff out these days Html is better, but the real thing today is tablet apps. All docs should be published as interactive 10/7/5 inch apps. Books should also disappear and be replaced by that form factor. Scientific paper authors also need to realize this and replace latex with app programming and publish their work as apps.

[omaranto]

As far as I can tell no file viewer or eBook reader tries to make browsing through a large file as convenient as physical page flipping. Electronic reading does let you find specific phrases, or go to an exact page number but browsing is still very inconvenient.

[zv]

The advantages for PDF is printing. You can't just set correctly page margins and other things with plain HTML.

[unz]

My point is - why is anyone printing anymore? Everyone can get their hands on a tablet these days

[TheZenPsycho]

Make documents available only as apps. This is a troll, right? You just gave us a very scary glimpse of the future.

[voltagex_]

Zinio and other magazine apps already do this. They're either encrypted SWFs or PDFs on the backend.

[TheZenPsycho]

Yeah, but scientific papers? Isn't that just taking the human race a giant step backwards?

[unz]

So paper is the final frontier?

Hundreds of years old tech is the optimum and 21st century tech like tablet computers is a step backwards for humanity?

[icebraining]

Are you intentionally missing the point? The objection was with apps and encrypted SWFs/PDFs, not all "21st century tech".

[unz]

OK .... looks like someone's in a bad mood

[TheZenPsycho]

Well no other tech has been demonstrated to last for literally centuries, other than paper.