Originally Posted by
FairWeatherFlyer
Device independent output is surprisingly non-trivial.
This is true. The solution at Boeing (some time ago) was to abandon development of various tablet solutions for factory job control and go back to paper. In the 1990s, these tablets were custom devices running custom software. And pretty bulky and under powered compared to an iPad. The paper copy as authority to perform a particular function eliminated a lot of problems with the early hardware. References to drawings in the job paper which could be retrieved on RS/6000 workstations were pretty clear if the computer terminal failed to serve up the correct drawing.
The PDF document format is pretty reliable. In part because it is actually a paper document formatting language at it's heart. And using an off-the-shelf commercial reader tends to be more reliable than custom solutions. With millions of users, Adobe is likely going to hear about missing content pretty quickly if the general public starts to lose pages from their favorite novels.