Impressive care has been taken in establishing these texts. PDF is an acronym for Portable Document File . All that is required to view and print the file is the freely available Acrobat viewer. The answer usually depends on the intended use. PDF may be better if the primary use is to read or print the document.
Navigation is easy because a hypertext table of contents can be created.
PDF allows a single word or phrase to be searched, but it is time consuming and inconvenient to search large bodies of text. This means that Boolean, phrase and proximity searching are faster by orders of magnitude. There are tools to help establish relevancy , attach personal notes, hilight text, create named bookmarks and hypertext links, etc. Search results can be more easily exported to word processing files and every paragraph and footnote is fully referenced to its corresponding location in the print edition. Shadow files make it possible to save this research for fast retrieval without having to save the entire database.