Sure, PDFs are anything but painless. I need a reader to look at them. Many of my devices don't have one or have some off brand one. Esp since I don't want to be beholden to the adobe update process.

I see. On most platforms, you should be able to get some PDF reader, open-source or otherwise. You could even use your browser. And seriously, what doc format could you look at without a “reader”?

“painless” was obviously meant with reference to the document's contents, not its representation format.

Whatever your reasons for disliking PDFs are, you can't expect an author to pander to every possible idiosyncrasy of the audience.

I prefer un-rendered LaTex or raw unicode hex streams.

Seriously though what's wrong with just a .txt, html, .md, etc file? All of those read easily. PDF.js is a real hog on lots of machines.

Do you get mad when people send out party invites as attached word documents? Same deal here.