> It is a shame Adobe designed a format so hard to work with

PDF was not designed to be editable, nor for anyone to "work with" it in that way.

It was designed (at least the original purpose circa 1989) to represent printed pages electronically in a format that would view and print identically everywhere. In fact, the initial advertising for the "value" of the PDF format was exactly this, no matter where a recipient viewed your PDF output, it would look, and print, identically to everywhere else.

It was originally meant to be "electronic paper".

Wasn't the PDF format based on the Illustrator format?

The weird thing to me is people using a distribution format as an original source. It's right up there with video cameras shooting an acquisition source as an MP4 and all of the negative baggage that comes with that.

1.4.4 Portable Document Format (PDF) Adobe has specified another format, PDF, for portable representation of electronic documents. PDF is documented in the Portable Document Format Reference Manual. PDF and the PostScript language share the same underlying Adobe imaging model. A document can be converted straightforwardly between PDF and the PostScript language; the two representations produce the same output when printed. However, PDF lacks the general-purpose programming language framework of the PostScript language. A PDF document is a static data structure that is designed for efficient random access and includes navigational information suitable for interactive viewing.

-- https://www.adobe.com/jp/print/postscript/pdfs/PLRM.pdf

This is a very valuable link - just generate PDFs yourself by hand or script.

> The weird thing to me is people using a distribution format as an original source.

Every distribution format will inevitably end up being used as a source; as the originals get lost in the mists of time.

I believe Illustrator format is very similar to PostScript.

.. waves to Leonard Rosenthol