PDF is literally digital paper. HTML has logical structure, it can adapt to different displays, etc.

Sometimes you want one, sometimes, the other.

You could, though. What you are describing are features of an editor, not a file format. I can imagine a browser addon performing the same tasks.

I noticed when trying it out for this comment, but then looked around when it was introduced and it seems recent (as in, an LTS distribution won't have it). Someone on stackoverflow said they get "unknown option --embed-resources". The old option will work for everyone and is also simpler, one instead of two parameters. People whose client supports the new option will see the upgrade suggestion when they run this. In the end I saw mainly downsides to mentioning the new rather than the old way

If you've ever copied text out of a PDF, you'll know it's not the original text anymore. Besides ligatures, you get broken sentences with extra hyphens inserted in wrong places (that were word/line breaks in the PDF-rendered version), if it'll properly let you select more than a few words at all. It works like "put these couple words at position x,y" and not (html's) semantic "here comes a heading" tag that helps people accessibly read your text, and if you're not suffering from any impairment or mobile devices with narrower screens than this particular render was designed for, it also lets you work with the document more easily. It's like you remove all HTML and keep only the CSS: all definitions of what's a section, sentence, emphasis, or caption are gone

I didn't mean literally an image, hence saying image-like. You get similar limitations to when using OCR, which seems very image-like to me

Not sure if I'm misreading your comment, but it's not plural files with all those formats separately

That's what the "self contained" option does: turn it into one nice file. Makes no difference if you copy example.pdf or example.html when both contain all images and styles (except one of them also contains the original semantic text)

If that is your goal, you should be cryptographically signing your documents with your PGP key. That way you actually have assurance the document has not been modified rather than just hoping someone hasn't modified the document. Additionally, PGP can sign anything so you are open to use whatever format you want.

May I recommend .html in that case? You can embed scripts that control who can run it, having it fetch a decryption token from a server or require a decryption password with a safe password hashing algorithm of your choice

It's much more versatile than PDF and, if the algorithm decides the user is allowed to read the document, then the user gets to make use of all of the document's options like a better search function (PDF can't find words that are bro-

ken across lines because that information of what's a word is gone, transformed into coordinates of what characters need to go where). It's also much more readable on different screen sizes, as the user can resize the window to whatever is comfortable on a 27" screen, or fits on their pocket e-reader. You can even draw it on a canvas if you want to prevent people from extracting the decrypted strings (though it's evil, you have that option). There's only benefits!

PDF is the lazy way to half-ass a read-only document while screwing, ahem, making anyone using a mobile phone zoom, pan, and squint. Thankfully, phones are falling out of fash— wait, scratch that, I just heard text reflow is more relevant than ever as phone use continues to soar

Is this really that much of a motivation in 2025? Maybe in 2000 you could publish a PDF with the assurance that only the people who paid for Acrobat would be able to edit it, but today, there are a lot of accessible ways to edit PDFs, I don't think I'd choose PDF if I for whatever reason wanted to limit others from editing.

I was thinking this too, PDF's exist so people don't mess with the document. That said, it's still a clever feature, and pandoc can convert html into a pdf as well with a conversion engine. That said, I suspect it'll fail on anything sufficiently complex

pandoc input.html -o output.pdf --pdf-engine=<your engine>

If I were police, I could still not enforce that this is what they run until it's law. They're free to choose this option if they like the merits