This is unrelated to the AI and healthcare. However, PDF is something that everyone utilises. There are calls to replace it, for good, as it’s clunky and has outlived its utility.
It’s founder, John Warnock (co-founder of Adobe) prototyped a compatibility layer where documents would look and, most importantly, print (!) the same regardless the computer they were viewed on (1993 video). The PDF is now 30 years old and outlived the printer. The “killer app” for PDF was tax returns – the IRS adopted PDF in 1996 because of a rumored frustration with the US Postal Service.
It’s slow, clunky, and clogs up the browsers (embedded files). It’s difficult to annotate (or have a universal language to ensure highlights stick) and the OCR’d files are useless.
Think about it.
Alternatives are epub.