Comment by cxr

> I'm not sure I understand why you think this would be a good goal.

You do already know. It's in your next sentence.

> Sometimes, however, you want more fine-grained, print-style control

That's fine. PDFs aren't going away, nor would aiming for the kind of thing I mentioned preclude the plaintext formats from finally gaining the ability to control print-level details with a set of formatting directives if you flip the switch in the writing app to make it let you target a "print profile" for that document. In fact TeX—being a plaintext format that also happens to lead to many of the PDFs we see anyway—is already an example of how to get the ultimate "fine-grained, print-style control" without being a clunky document from an office suite, which aren't actually all that great at that level of control, anyway (but TeX itself is not well-suited for this use case, for its own reasons).

The point is that most people shuttling Office documents around are most of the time not using it for those reasons, so their 80% use cases shouldn't carry the baggage nor impose it on others. It would be one thing if it were just a matter of people not knowing, but the reality is that neither the tooling nor the cultural inertia for those non-existent tools are really where they should be.

> People still do print things out too, like fliers and signup sheets.

nonsequitur