What's the obsession with "looking the same everywhere"?
Page references: this shouldn't be a thing. Academia has already solved this problem for notable texts. Rather than nearly uncountable numbers of paragraphs that all run together, paragraphs or short sections or lines are numbered. See any good edition of Plato or Aristotle, or just about any notable play or longer poem ever translated. Relying on a single published layout of a work to reference is dumb.
Citing exact line numbers isn't even necessary for native-language works. When they're digital, search works. It works even better in flowed-format texts than it does in pdfs, which sometimes, depending on how the pdf was constructed, won't match text properly across newlines.
Visual quality: As long as images—data, charts, graphs, photographs—are not degraded beyond usefulness, the actual text, and its display, is up to the reader application. Everyone uses the web complete with mathjax, and those doesn't have Knuth-approved formatting in every respect. But they're good enough, and they work everywhere on every device without squinting or pinch to zoom. There are some people who insist on putting pre-rendered images of math in html, and they always look worse, because they don't match the text without a lot of work to have extra high-res images that are auto-scaled according to viewport and surrounding font size—work that I bet not many people have ever done in the history of html publishing.
