PDF: Unfit for Human Consumption - WTF?

Having been developing websites for quite a great number of years now and have seen just about every way possible to publish content to the web, some good and most bad. One of the more common “good” ways is in PDF format. The PDF is a printable file that provides a uniform and standardized way to send content to another person that when printed will look exactly the way the author intended. The PDF offers a certain degree of "copy protection" to the file since when using the free Adobe Reader you cannot readily select text and plagiarize it in your Word documents.
" Users Hate PDF
I hate Adobe Acrobat. If I bring up PDF, I can't take a section and copy it and move it to Word. There could be stuff like graphics I don't want. I prefer documents in HTML format so that it's editable."
As Microsoft would say this is a "Feature" not a bug to complain about, get over it.

[begin rant]
Any event the author of this article seems to think that the PDF is the devil though he cleverly dodges what is really bothering him. It’s not the PDF but the browser plug-in that will load the PDF into your browser window.

Despite the few good issues that he brings up about how a PDF file should be setup (given the available options in Adobe Acrobat) I think I can safely say that the author of this article has no idea what he is talking about.
[/end rant]

Related Web URL: http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20030714.html