Precisely. PDFs were intended to specify how a document would appear in print. Page size, font, location of illustration: all are fixed. At my work, we send books to the printers as PDFs.
In particular, PDFs were NOT originally intended for live online use. They were for things that were to be downloaded and printed. Now, Adobe has added all kinds of live features like forms and embedded 3-D models that require the user to view them on the computer, and can’t be printed, but those are still presented withing a print-derived page format.
Web presentation of vector art is better done through things like SVG and Flash, IMHO. And web presentation of text is better done through a browser using HTML, XML, CSS, and the like; that way, the text can flow to fill whatever window space is available.
But people keep trying to make the web into a print document.
It’s odd that with that pressure, no standard for downloadable fonts has triumphed.
Just as an aside, for anyone who needs to stick with Acrobat (at work or whatever), if you want to avoid opening the PDF in Firefox, go Tools -> Options -> Content -> Manage and change the action for the file type you want. Right now I have it to save PDFs to a temp file and open it with Acrobat so it doesn’t freeze the browser.
If I understand you correctly, the Firefox Extension “PDF Downloader” is a great substitute, it asks you each time you click a PDF what you want to do with it (Open, Save, Open in Acrobat.)
True! But there are always those people that look at extensions and go ‘bwuh?’ or would get into trouble for installing one, or run PortableFirefox without room for extensions…okay, you got me. Just pointing out a built-in way to do it, and it works for all file extensions, so you can choose what to do when you download an mp3 or hit an swf or whatever.