Ask HN: Why are academic articles published as PDFs? - rememberlenny
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PaulHoule
PDF is a workable format for documents intended for paper. With PDF you can
produce documents with TeX or LaTeX or Microsoft Word or many other tools and
get good fidelity printing on paper or viewing on a screen.

For all the hype, web-based formats like MathML just don't equal what you can
do other kinds of workflows.

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_RPM
Portable Document Format. That means it is portable. The web browser is the
most portable platform currently. Most browsers can display PDF's. Most
browsers can't display other formats such as Word, etc.

