The irony here is that all of those papers were written in LaTeX, still the only serious tool of choice for academic papers. The LaTeX is rendered out to PDF for easy emailing to journals, peers, etc. LaTeX is what HTML hoped to be when it grew up, before the weird CSS cousins moved in and trashed the house, ruining everyone’s dreams.
If instead we could get the original LaTeX code and make that more available, it would be much easier to make clean and readable versions in HTML, Markdown, or your other markup/procedural-formatting tool of choice.
But I guess that’s a nirvana fallacy and if converting the PDFs back to something like HTML helps people, more power to 'em. Even if it does amount to playing a CD over the radio, then recording that broadcast back to a cassette tape in order to give to someone.
