I agree that most organizations that are sophisticated enough to use PDF are probably sophisticated enough to get documents electronically in the first place. I also agree that it is reasonable to expect that these organizations to be cognoscente of the advantages of HTML over PDF.

I think WL may be underestimating entrenched bureaucracy reliance on paper. Someone (far down the chain) is given the task of posting these paper documents and decides to use Adobe products to do so. The use of PDF that seems most justifiable is to capture the look and feel of _manipulated_ paper documents. Sure a form may be available electronically (in a print-oriented format), but that doesn't mean that the filled-in form can be captured acceptably in HTML. What about the "Date Received" red ink time stamp? What about capturing official letterhead and signatures from an important memorandum? (Sure digital signatures and the like are available, but not for documents that begin life in print! Images can be faked too, but at least they have face validity.) Presumably, PDF is particularly functional in this case because the of the available Adobe utilities for linking the captured photograph of the page with the OCR interpreted text (no matter how poorly done).

This justification for a limited use of PDF has a few problems. The rational need for capturing the "look and feel" of a print page, even for a manipulated paper form, is VERY rare. Print pages, when appropriate, could just as easily be scanned and posted as large GIFs. Understandably, most web publishers would cringe at this idea, yet this is exactly what they are doing with PDF! The difficulty with the inaccuracy of even the best OCR is independent of the issue of accessibility. Adobe's software merely obfuscates these problems and gives users the mistaken impression that they have a solution!

Charles McCathieNevile wrote:

WL suggested that webmasters could just tell people to give them the
electronic version which was used to produce the paper version. Which is
usually true, although not always.

...

This is the value of PDF - it enables printed material to be reliably
transferred electronically, then printed at the receiving end. For this
one purpose it is an excellent medium, and cheaper for most people than
using RTF, as well as (I believe) less capable of being used to transmit
viruses. It is not a good substitute for HTML (in my humble opinion), and
does not seem likely to become one.