Thanks to John Lord for telling us some useful things about PDF. As he said, sometimes these technical issues have to be talked about because they affect the ready dissemination of information.
I just tried a resource recommended in a recent thread, an EPA permit guide. It was a half-MB PDF file -- not a bad size for a 120 page document, so it wasn't too big, and it was internally searchable.
However, when I opened it I got the message "Unable to find or create the font "WPIconic SymbolsA" Some characters may not display or print correctly." -- so I guess it wasn't shipped with its fonts. That's why most PDF documents don't, in fact, display the same way on all platforms.
I have Adobe 4.0, and I couldn't figure how to cut and paste text from this document into anything else. It has two columns. There is an "article tool" under the normal select tool that might be used to outline one column without mixing it with the other, but I didn't see a way to cut and paste the outlined text. As a result I can't put a quote from this document into another one without typing it in or unmixing the columns after cut-and-paste.
Lastly, scrolling through it was slow, even with my Pentium III computer after I had downloaded it all.
The document info says it was made using PDFWriter for Windows. I'd guess that it was originally written in Word. I can't help but think that the Word translation utility could have been used to make an HTML copy of the document, which would be much easier for casual reading and for Web engine searching, in addition to the PDF one.
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