>>18
>>20
has never done any kind of serious typesetting
I've done serious text editing and manipulation.
>>22 pretty much nailed it on the head. Comparing typesetting to text editing very clearly illustrates that you don't have a clue what you're talking about.
In everything you've said, you keep referring to webpages. For fuck's sake, not everything can or should be designed with HTML and CSS. By deliberately avoiding PDFs and converting them to text, of which you seem so proud, you have no sense of what a properly typeset article should look like.
It's much more important than viewing it the way you want. If you break the formatting of my article and then redistribute it, you make me look like an idiot. If you change the content of my contract, you can legally fuck me over.
"serious text editing and manipulation"... You sound like a freelance editor for shitty news editorials or something. You've been dealing with text for 20 years, and you get frustrated because you can't edit the PDFs your clients send you. If this sounds like your job, then PDFs are obviously not for you; you're supposed to do your work BEFORE the document ever hits PDF format. That's not a fault of PDF, it's a fault of your clients.