interesting
That is not how your response came off, at all. I appreciate your clarification.
I'm in full agreement that open digital standards should absolutely be the default, and that working toward those ends is a good thing. Interestingly, Adobe has published specifications for PDF documents for general use, and it is effectively at least as much of an "open standard" as OOXML (the new MS Office document format). Adobe violates or destructively extends its own specifications at times, of course, but so does Microsoft, so the result is much the same (probably worse for MS Office, actually). In terms of principle, choosing between PDFs and MS Office documents is kind of a matter of six of one and half a dozen of the other; in practice, however, non-interactive PDFs are much more widely accessible. There are also more open source applications that can read and properly render non-interactive PDFs than MS Office documents, and even ODF files impose some problems in viewing and accessibility that do not apply to PDFs.
EPUB would be a better format for many purposes. Best of all would be plain text, when at all reasonable -- possibly using Markdown formatting, given the wide availability of Markdown rendering options. Of course, these formats have relatively limited formatting options, somewhat restricting their suitability to use in some circumstances, but that's not always a bad thing.
