To badly paraphrase Star Wars, "your confidence in your friends is your greatest weakness". Pdf sucks, it's little more than a glorified 2d graphics api that happens to be used mostly for content that should be represented as text. Except that there are dozens of ways to make stuff look like text, but without the advantages.
If you're really suggesting what I'm reading into your post, which is that 'academic pdfs' are somehow some sort of glorious special species because everybody in academia uses latex and all publications are typeset using that, then I have a bridge in Brooklyn you might be interested in.
