>I view PDFs on Okular and that has a zoom control.
This caused me to do a little research...
The image chosen to illustrate Okular's capabilities on Wikipedia made me smile. It nicely illustrates how narrow and limited many commenters experience is; you wouldn't use Word to write a musical score, however, PDF allows those without the relevant application to read your score.
Which reminds me of other uses of PDF and history!
We forget just how painful Word was before the rise of PDF; yes Word allowed you to do object embedding, only problem was anyone else wanting to read your Word document and view all those Visio diagrams, etc. that you had so carefully embedded, had to have the relevant applications installed on their system. Obviously, you could paste-as-picture/image but that made updating a pain. However, print as PDF and everyone could view your document as you intended - okay that might have made feedback harder, but generally many people simply printed off the document, annotated it by hand and handed it back.
Similarly for MS Project plans, want to ensure everyone can read the current plan, just print to PDF (using a sensible page size).
Interestingly, I've never received a document that used or a request for documents to be sent in, Microsoft's "PDF killer" XPS format. [Aside: I don't understand why MS haven't killed this off yet.]
Picking up on archival and OCR comments, one aspect of PDF not commented upon is it's ability to contain document layers, so for imaging and workflow applications, PDF was an ideal format, paper could be scanned to TIFF, OCR'd and the two files combined into a single PDF file. This meant that you could search on the OCR'd text and if it didn't read well (ie. it contained scan errors) you could view the original TIFF image.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
