Question about PDF manipulation

Some of the attitudes here about PDF impress me as about the most ludditical (is there such a word?) as I've seen in a long time. Suppose you have a CompuPro memory card and no manual. The card is useless. I give you the PDF file of the manual. You can look at the manual on-screen, or you can print it and you HAVE the hard copy manual. In color, where the original was in color, and with quality that may be indistinguishable from (or in some cases actually better than) the original manual when it was new. Is that a benefit? Is it better than no manual at all? Is it, essentially, as good as being able to call CompuPro (which no longer exists) and order a new manual, FOR FREE, and have it delivered INSTANTLY? So what if it's not "searchable". Get a clue: THE ORIGINAL PAPER MANUAL WAS NOT "SEARCHABLE". But if you or anyone else wants it to be searchable they are certain welcome to OCR the document, a capability which Acrobat supports. (Note that if it was EITHER made from it's source document (e.g. Word or whatever) OR if it was "OCR'd" (which Acrobat itself can do), it WILL be searchable. The people who don't like PDFs either have not used Acrobat extensively or don't understand the real nature of the prouduct. Acrobat allows you to create an electronic document that can have as many features (or as few) as the creator wants: -Page images -Searchable, exportable, "copyable" text -Fonts and graphics -Printable -Fully "rearrangeable" (re-sequence, add, delete, replace pages) -Table of Contents (as hyperlink) -Index -Movies, photos, sound and other multimedia objects -Security control, passwords determining who can do what And it and the documents it creates are multi-platform: PC, Apple, Linux, Sun, IBM mainframe .... virtually every computer platform in existence. It's one of the best and most wonderful tools that the PC world has ever created. Sorry if it's proprietary, but sometimes quality tools are only created by people who want to be paid for their work.