Re: I don't mind PDFs
You are right, of course. So people do ask for a printable copy, and that usually means PDF.
However ... a company that shall remain nameless, has three related products that it acquired.
The original company used to ship an HTML and PDF version of the Admin Guide with each of the products.
New company, seeing that since these are built on a common base, decides to munge together all the Admin Guides into one, so as to be able to share the commonality, which, they learn is actually common, but slightly different.
Then they decided to prefix this with the release notes of each version going back to when Noah used it on his Arc.
So the first 1,000+ pages are just release notes ...
It's all HTML ... but you can convert it to PDF. It is humongous, and has problems like tables split over boundaries, and column sizes changed to fit, so some are just too small and have 20 word sentences, one word strung out above the other.
There used to be a time when tech writers took some small pride in their work...