The author argues that PDF isn't obsolete, because it's an excellent replacement for paper forms that need to be reproduced exactly. This is true. But I think these paper forms are themselves becoming obsolete as bureaucracies switch to online forms.<p>We use PDFs for a different purpose. We use them as a intermediate format when processing and archiving documents from other software. We need to support 100+ file formats, and we need to accurately preserve the underlying appearance.<p>PDF is great for this kind of "visual capture," because it's the most common format that can preserve arbitrary formatting and graphics. And unlike TIFFs or PNGs, PDFs can be searched and highlighted, because they optionally contain the full text of the document.