I think it is pretty safe to assume that everybody using FreeDOS in the last 10 to 20 years has access to another, more capable device that can read PDFs. Even low end cell phones have had this capability for the past 5 years.
I started with pure TXT files, composed on the same DOS machine that I did my coding and testing on. But even in 2013 those files were adding up to more than 210K across 16 files. Just like I migrated from using a hardware 80386 to a cross compiler for the code in 2011, I migrated the documented for PDF in 2015. The PDF format lets me do far better formatting and screen shots, which are useful for clear documentation. As cool as it would be to have everything self contained and self hosted within DOS, that's not our reality. I think it's more important to use the appropriate tools for the job, PDF is very good for documentation - just not on DOS. Given that everybody probably has access to something that can read PDFs, there is not much of a reason to downgrade carefully written and formatted documentation. I am concerned about these kinds of things because I do put a lot of energy into ensuring my work is properly packaged. It's probably possible to export the PDF has HTML, but again I'd want to do that myself to ensure the formatting stays reasonable. (And even then, the generated HTML is not going to be usable on the 16 bit machines with CGA that I target.) -Mike
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