(waves) Though agree completely about Docs not being web/non-paginated by default.

I know that it’s the standard for law and academia — but every single app is able to output HTML + graphics at this point. It should not be on the web. On a USB stick to bring to a print shop, sure 😜 (also: *wave* miss talking to you)

Let's lunch! I can tell you about my dumbest, most glorious purchase, an ebook reader which supports one and only one file format (not html ;)

The problem is not that HTML/CSS cannot display content as well as PDF, the problem is that browsers fail to print physically accurate representations--of anything. I fought and fought to improve printing support to avoid this problem, but I failed.

For items that need to be printed, 100% agreed. But *only* PDFs online should not be the default in 2019. So many companies put e.g. their support documentation in PDF form online — when they should be able to export that to HTML quite easily. Not trying to kill PDF for print :)

I'm probably wrong, and we should consult someone like @davidbaron about this, but knowing in advance that one is dealing with 8.5x11 really affects standards and feature choices. Once we engineered unbounded layouts, printing fell to the wayside while writing the new code.

I think there are different use cases for PDF on the Web: * some people use it because they want to offer something as a saveable package (e.g., a bank statement) for archival * some people care about the particular print layout * maybe others I think the first is likely bigger.

There's a bunch we could do to fix printing in browsers. But there's also a tension when we do this. Some people see the goal of browser printing being to reflect the on-screen web page as accurately as possible (e.g., slice the float in half), ...

... while others think we should make the meaning of CSS in printing what people who were writing CSS with print in mind would want (e.g., try to position each float entirely on one page if it fits, changing the layout as appropriate).

Generally users expect the former (and most web page authors don't care about printing), whereas people who actually want to do print stuff on the web want the latter. We've mostly made decisions to match the user expectation, but as a result the developer facing API is ugly.