Why anyone treats PDF as anything but a write-once format is beyond me. It's so finicky that I'm not shocked bugs like this happen. The only programs I'd be reasonable sure wouldn't screw it up are Acrobat itself, and pdflatex and friends.
I think we need a multi-image container format. It could be something that's literally a bunch of jpgs/pngs/pick your poison in a tar container, and given a new extension. OSes would open it and present it as a gallery in order. There's no value in a non-ocr'd PDF existing. For OCR'd text that gets more complicated, but it feels like we should be able to come up with a common denominator that doesn't have the legacy of a binary format derived from postscript in the early 90s.
I think we need a multi-image container format. It could be something that's literally a bunch of jpgs/pngs/pick your poison in a tar container, and given a new extension. OSes would open it and present it as a gallery in order. There's no value in a non-ocr'd PDF existing. For OCR'd text that gets more complicated, but it feels like we should be able to come up with a common denominator that doesn't have the legacy of a binary format derived from postscript in the early 90s.