Preferences for PDF of an article, or full-text HTML in the browser?

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162552
Posted by Brian Cody, community karma 162552
I was thinking about my research process, and I realized that I tend to download PDFs to read later (or potentially read later), but I don't love the actual reading experience in a PDF, specifically scaling the text to be a good reading size, paginating jumps that make it hard to have a good reading flow, and searching is often difficult. 

When I am looking to read an article right away, I definitely prefer finding the full-text in the browser, copy-and-pasting notes, and sometimes sending the URL to my iPad to read the article there. The continuous scroll of the long webpage makes it easier for me to read, and I find that my browser's built-in search works much better than a PDF search.

That said, I was curious what benefits other scholars see for PDFs of articles, compared to the full-text of the article being provided in the browser. Any benefits I'm missing?
over 10 years ago