Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.

I see you too are a person of culture.

Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.

The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.

Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.

What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?