Why PDF is bad for the web
If the web got to start over, PDF would feel like a relic from a paper-first era, not the default document experience we still inherit today.
PDF prioritizes fixed pixels over meaning. It locks content inside a canvas where text becomes painting instructions. That makes it heavier to transfer, harder to index, brittle to adapt, and hostile to accessibility and reuse.
It is illogical for the web. Documents should flow, link, and adapt. They should be readable by machines and humans, not trapped in a viewer pretending every screen is a sheet of paper.
It is also a bad substrate for modern product behavior. Real-time editing, AI-assisted generation, mobile collaboration, and structured export all get harder when the source document is fundamentally opaque.
That is why LDF exists. It treats HTML, CSS, structure, and assets as first-class citizens. It keeps the portability people want from documents while making the file itself dramatically more useful to software.
A web-native alternative
LDF is built for products like Eddocu that need to import legacy formats, make them editable, let teams collaborate, and export again without collapsing into screenshots and hacks. It is compact, semantic, inspectable, and friendlier to version control than the formats it replaces.
Read the repo
The format and site are being built in public at github.com/yeargun/ldf-web .
