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I have an idea. Why not allow embedding a full browser engine inside of a PDF, complete with tabs and extensions? I hate having to leave Adobe Acrobat in orde
by ravenstine 6y ago
I have an idea. Why not allow embedding a full browser engine inside of a PDF, complete with tabs and extensions? I hate having to leave Adobe Acrobat in order to read my Gmail, so I think this feature could be really useful. Anyone who builds a PDF can include their own custom browser that their users will love.
- IncRnd 6y agoJust run Emacs :)
- contravariant 6y agoWell if you can run interactive javascript then you're mostly there, PDF is pretty much Turing complete so you can just crosscompile a browser into it using javascript to take care of the interactive parts, though you might need to rewrite the rendering logic.
- IncRnd 6y agoPDFs are definitely not Turing complete. [0] [0] https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-complete/index.html#from-postscript-to-pdf https://www.cs.odu.edu/~zeil/cs390/latest/Public/turing-comp...
- jsight 6y agoI'm assuming that predates the addition of JavaScript support, though.
- contravariant 6y agoAh I see I may have been thinking of Postscript. Though I'm not entirely convinced they haven't accidentally added Turing completeness back in at some point. I mean you don't really need all that much to write a basic lisp interpreter.
- IncRnd 6y agoWell, now that you mention it..... It's likely that PDFs in Firefox are Turing Complete, since JS is Turing Complete.
- SAI_Peregrinus 6y agoJS embedding isn't unique to Firefox. This is Firefox catching up with an old feature from Adobe Acrobat. PDFs with embedded JS have been Turing complete for years, in readers that run the JS. Just like PDFs with embedded Flash content. The PDF layout language isn't Turing complete on its own.
- gwern 6y agoDepends on your PDF viewer... https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments https://github.com/osnr/horrifying-pdf-experiments
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]