alt Hacker NewsA PDF of a long document such as a standard or reference manual is almost always preferable to an HTML version. HTML versions have issues with formatting, searching (as browsers struggle with multi-thousand page documents and non-native search document search implementations almost always suck), indexing, correct behavior on windows size change (especially a side-by-side pdf view is almost unheard of for webpages), ... . Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me.
> correct behavior on windows size change
Except the PDF is not responsive at all and you can't increase or decrease the font size without increasing the whole width of page.
> Some vendors have switched to online-only for some documents and it always annoys me.
HTML shouldn't mean online-only. If the vendor isn't trying to make it hard to download, you should always be able to convert to PDF. But PDF to HTML is very hard or impossible.