I'll make a defense of pdf publishing here. The points the author makes are good, but also show why pdf has a role to play. Responsive design being the most difficult. Imagine you're producing a scientific paper, and it contains a big table. It's unreasonable to ask an author to figure out how make every table and figure display correctly on every screen.
Think of it this way. If you're publishing a pdf, then you master the formatting using your word processor (latex, word, what have you). On the other hand, if you're publishing on a responsive web site, then you really ought to have a content management system to guide you through the requirements of the platform. It's a significantly higher hurdle, both for the authors and the platform owners.
Publishing shouldn't be about displaying nicely in screen though but rather about sharing the information.
As a bioinformatician, big tables inside pdfs are essentially useless. What's the point of a few hundred rows worth of a table if you can't manipulate it with whatever tool you prefer?
Moreover, I'm writing my thesis and dealing with many pdfs from the 90s in most of which I can't just highlight and copy text so I need to type it out like a savage. Is it guaranteed that today's pdfs will be easy to handle for future people?
In my opinion publishing should be done in plain text and .tsv files and the onus of displaying it on screen should fall on the editor (isn't that their job anyway ??)
Think of it this way. If you're publishing a pdf, then you master the formatting using your word processor (latex, word, what have you). On the other hand, if you're publishing on a responsive web site, then you really ought to have a content management system to guide you through the requirements of the platform. It's a significantly higher hurdle, both for the authors and the platform owners.