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), ...

This was something I always wanted to work on, but everyone made it sound like the printing code was really not well understood/maintained/loved. For so many people, printing from the web doesn't matter. But in education, it's still huge and I think it would be great to improve

There are two+ disconnected parts to the printing code: * interaction with printer drivers, the OS, and things like print settings and paper sizes * how to break up HTML/CSS across pages Bob Owen has done a bunch of good work lately on the former; I probably (!) own the latter

The latter is hard because it requires a good understanding of the full range of what CSS can do. You need to know all the cases, because if you don't you'll end up with dangling pointer bugs, at least logically if not actually, because you end up with bugs of the sort...