Originally Posted by
EEngr
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.
Though with sufficiently complex software, one will encounter bugs. I wonder how a PDF reader would act when there's insufficient memory to load (or transform) a large bitmap image. Will the entire image be dropped, some pixels dropped, etc?