“printing documents consistently and with selectable text”
It’s fine for that purpose but it’s terrible for eBooks, manuals, science papers and a lot of other stuff it’s used for. Some HTML with everything in one file would be much better in my opinion. Something like CHM maybe which MS used to use for help files.
We've printed several grammars of languages south Asia from PDFs, and we've also used the PDFs in the absence of the printed grammars. Some of these languages use the Arabic script, generally the nasta'liq version. The Arabic language usually uses the naskh version of the Arabic script, and it can be represented reasonably well with any of a variety of fonts. But nasta'liq is a different beast, and until very recently typesetting it was virtually impossible. (Urdu newspapers were hand written by calligraphers, and reproduced using photo-offset, well past the milenium.) There are now reasonably good nasta'liq fonts (SIL offers a good one), which we used to produce our PDFs (and then embedded the font in the PDF for portability). You still won't get good nasta'liq in HTML unless you happen to have the right rendering engine + the right font.
In short, I don't think we could have typeset these grammars without PDF.
We also did a grammar of Dhivehi, which is the only language in the world that uses the Thaana script. Thaana can be typeset quite easily--if you happen to have the right font. Most people don't. I guess the same thing holds if you happen to be publishing grammars of languages that used cuneiform--not many computer systems have cuneiform fonts!
It’s fine for that purpose but it’s terrible for eBooks, manuals, science papers and a lot of other stuff it’s used for. Some HTML with everything in one file would be much better in my opinion. Something like CHM maybe which MS used to use for help files.