You are completely right, 99% of the people will read the PDF, in exactly the same sense that Windows users prefer to download an installable EXE instead of building from source.

But nobody here will argue that the *option* to build from source is useful no? So I don't see why this would not apply to compiling tex files into PDF. But I don't know anything about tex, so I can't really say. I'm using Microsoft Word, shame on me! Yes, I really should learn LaTeX though, because writing a lot of math equations in Word is tiresome...

Hi Peter,

Yes, but why don't researchers just publish their TEX file? You can
regard that as the "source code" for generating PDF/PS whatever no?


Building a .tex file can be rather hard with packages and what-not,
plus quite a few of us use lhst2tex as a preprocessor. It's not
impossible, but its not trivial either, and I can't imagine that
anyone would use a .tex over a PDF.

If there is a much better format than PDF as generated by the standard
class files, it should be the authors creating it, not other people
post-processing the tex.

Thanks

Neil