<p><em>bangs head against wall</em></p>
<p>at least in math and physics, pdf’s are common because LaTeX is king in those fields. word, html, etc. are completely inadequate for serious scientific typesetting, so people use LaTeX. also, not everyone wants to compile .tex files every time they want to read a paper, and postscript files can be kind of annoying, so people pipe tex output to pdf as a container format.</p>
<p>to be honest, i think LaTeX is so beautiful that I use it for humanities papers, too.</p>
<p>anyway, if you guys are using adobe reader, it will be slow. you should use foxit reader or some other third party reader if you run on windows. better yet, use linux and xpdf.</p>