Question about PDF manipulation

Presumably at some point the question needs to be one of what alternatives there are out there, what their pros and cons are, and how many people don't like format x / don't care / think format x is a good idea. In the context of what the data is and what it's being used for. Otherwise it gets to the situation as with Word docs - seems like everyone throws Word docs around because that's what everyone else does, not because it's the right tool for the job at hand. I've yet to see a good defence of PDF files, but that doesn't mean that people haven't made a careful choice to use PDF over anything else and for perfectly good reasons. I'm happy converting downloaded PDF files to seperate image files for my own use; and of course I very much appreciate the efforts of those who put these things together :) But there is a question of whether conversion to PDF throws important data away, or whether Adobe might suddenly change the tools, or whether they'll carry on getting ever more bloated, or whether PDF's going to be a viable format in ten years time... (I notice that Word is moving to an XML-based format, which is likely a good thing - it's going to make it possible to easily search and convert at least) cheers Jules