There's even a package (cmarker) than can translate Markdown to Typst which could be enough for a MVP.
We have responsive and open standards like HTML and EPUB (zipped XTML) and they work great. arXiv has HTML papers, and libgen and anna's archive often have EPUB versions of books. The issue for me with EPUB is the lack of good readers now.
Purely psychologically, I think there’s something that feels more "secure" or long-lasting about PDF’s perceived quasi-immutability compared to formats designed to be edited.
Sure, I would like that beautifully designed page to magically become a single column beautiful document on my phone, but I will take the former over a badly designed text extract where the relevant figure is 10 pages away.
Epub (=html) is good for novels, but there is nothing replacing PDF for science papers. If anything, the latex (or ideally typst) source would come the closest, if properly written (not absolute offsets). That could be used to produce different page sized versions.
In my experience it's the NON software engineers who tend to underestimate the complexity
It’s on of the few examples when converting it in to picture and chucking it in a multimodal llm is a more sensible solution than trying to parse it.
I months into building a pasteboard transform library that normalises VS Code, Google Docs, PDFs and a bunch of Chromium apps provider-specific data so I can start pasting everything everywhere exactly how I want it. It's much, much messier than I expected.
Apps put different UTTypes on the pasteboard that are not really compatible with each other. Usually there's a plain text fallback, then rich text/HTML, then provider-specific data. You show how much insane work is needed just to make text selectable with glyph mappings, layout, links, code blocks, rendered styles, etc. But once you copy from that PDF, most viewers still only expose raw text, and often broken raw text at that...
So macOS does not really give you a clean "this app copied this semantic object" API. Clipboard-history apps generally poll NSPasteboard.changeCount, which already makes provenance fuzzy, since you can observe that the pasteboard changed, but not reliably know the source app.
Pasting is fuzzy too. You know what representations were available, but not what the destination app actually accepted, because that decision happens inside the app and is generally opaque for the OS. So what even is history? Is it the raw object, the fallback text, the richest representation, the thing you intended to paste, or the thing the target app consumed? And even if you define history as "the observed events", polling can also miss states. And once you add transforms (like I want to), you basically have to define your own history model. A coherent OS clipboard-history API probably will never happen without big effort and liability policy changes from providers.