@simon I think there's a sort of … contact high of implied prestige that comes from print layouts like this? like, academia uses PDFs mostly due to legacy publication rules based on paper. corporate comms mimicked that style for a long time in order to grant relevance to their "white papers". then white papers gained their own idioms, borrowing from trade press magazines.
all just a general vibe I'm getting, not even really sure how I'd *begin* to go about substantiating this