My kids' last school still sends Word docs out as email attachments. I raised with them the fact that this is not a portable document format, was regularly unreadable on my Mac, and discriminates against the poorer families. Turned out the head mistress' brother works for Microsoft so this didn't go down well.
I'd argue PDF is equally problematic as it is often designed for A4 paper format, and this not easily readable on mobile devices, which poorer families are more likely to have as main computing device.
PDF is, it's true, also appalling. What I was actually asking the school to do was just write the shit they put in Word docs in the actual email. There was absolutely no need for it to be in an attached document, it was just words and pictures.
