To understand the problematic of the players, I think that it is important to know that on the corporate world, having a piece of software approved for installation can take many weeks (and sometimes even months), eventually being denied at the end.

For reasons that I think are obvious, in this same environment, making the notebook available through cloud service is also a no go, as content is typically IP sensible, and the public cloud is not an approved sharing point (I mean, if the CDF player is not listed on the company tools, why would the public cloud be...).

So, either Wolfram technologies are well integrated on the working environment of a given company, and all these tools are pre-approved, or even eventually already installed (a very small chance... as I myself, for instance, have never encountered such a case....), or there’s a great chance that the pdf will be the only option for sharing.

For the time being I have used the cloud publish option. But anything wrapped in Manipulate, for example, takes seconds to respond. It is painful and unimpressive.

Personally I hope they figure out a way to make CDF, or something like it, work. The prospect to make dynamic and interactive documents (i.e., computational essays) is what really attracted me to the platform over other options. See Brett Victor's Explorable Explanations as an example of what I mean. I very much like Mathematica as an authoring environment, so much more than hand coding JavaScript and HTML (ugh). But you have to have a way to share. In the early days of PDF, Adobe got their PDF viewer proliferated and it ultimately caught on. I really hope the folks at Wolfram have a push to clarify how the Wolfram Viewer helps with sharing coming soon.

The "CDF Concept", if I remember, was (is) to allow streaming collaboration and cloud publishing, that is, being able to show (part of) a notebook to colleagues real time, steaming, if they are connected, even allowing remote software to connect and receive realtime cloud updates. The entire concept was not "display whole notebook to a colleague" which was considered "old fashioned". However, the new Front End does cloud publishing and web server streams and cloud publishing. I'm unsure how CDF can trump that game either. Personally, I see front end has "end user collaboration tools" but people share work in Wolfram Communities in old fashion form! And then also, while many upload CDF or view on the wolfram demonstrations site - these are not real-time. I'm at a loss as to whether CDF can achieve its goals and not be a copy of the Front End by the time it completes it.

And still, we share our work, questions and answers, not using Mathematica's built-in collaboration tools, but a silly blog website (that's moderated!) It's bound to be that way for the fore-seeable future. Who would store the contents and make it all searchable? Why do people keep coming back to blog websites to communicate if they have advanced collaboration tools?

"Printing to pdf often cuts off graphics and they are only partially contained in the file." Format->Screen Environment->Printout will show you the page perfect look of your document. PDF, or Postscript, are page languages.

In Mathematica 4.0 PDF and PS were nearly perfect, down to issues of fine pixel or sub-pixel granularity. There should be no reversion from perfection of old features (graphics and text). I did run into a minor one (line drawing of a TableForm grid which did the postscript incorrectly, but i avoided it by using a different line grid). Overall I think the PDF system is still "perfect" per say, down to the pixel usually.

The way notebook was shared in Mathematica 4.0 is that the Front End was free and downloadable (and still is) but the Kernel was disabled (disabling the end users from changing any content). Front End was released multi-platform (meaning Apple and Microsoft and "True Unix" or SCO Unix, at the time, although the Microsoft version was highly broken due to microsoft font issues and microsoft instability of Win95).

CDF or ?Player, I understand, is supposed to replace the "free front end", and involves Java - many did not applaud, although Wolfram team said it was transitional and would improve to make releasing the Front End for download "un-necessary" while GIVING FREE USERS the ability to animate and "play back" interactive notebooks (I don't understand why a free Front End cannot do this, but don't care because I only share my complaints anyway!) I've never read an article saying Wolfram has stopped allowing free download of Mathematica Front End - but I think they have done so.

LaTex was never fully supported, and modern versions are drastically hacked by GPL and bound not to have any true support ever in anyone's lifetime. (AMS LaTex was mostly supported - the American Math Society, which is now no longer interested in producing a free math font system, if i am correct). Latex worked find but if you read older math books you'll see it was always far from complete - most old math books used various tricks to get around things Latex could not do or simply out of laziness. The higher end math books were type-set by professional layout persons who literally laid out the book by hand before publishing. I was introduced to a person who did such a thing once, in his office.

I'm not understanding why the CDF and Player and 15 day free trial are insufficient to share a notebook. Perhaps you can be more clear how many notebooks you wish to share and which end user cannot install CDF?

I have had some limited success by setting the page size Printer Settings | Page Settings.

But, that doesn't work very well if you want to print the PDFs. But it seems to work sort of OK if you don't need to print.