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It's a 2000 page spec that links to other specs (eg JPEG, PNG). It is a turing complete document format that can run arbitrary code without a sandbox. It is a m
by adgjlsfhk1 5y ago
It's a 2000 page spec that links to other specs (eg JPEG, PNG). It is a turing complete document format that can run arbitrary code without a sandbox. It is a mix of a binary and text format (some opcodes are in binary, some in text which just why?). All in all, it is a format designed to be incredibly hard to implement so people just give up and pay adobe.
- kaba0 5y agoOther than some stupid feature of it (like some of the ones you mentioned, maybe also forms), I really don’t think it is too hard to implement - there are plenty of open-source pdf reader libraries.
- leni536 5y agoPlenty as in poppler, mupdf and pdfium? Are there others?
- kaba0 5y agoThere are open-source libraries as well for e.g. Java, C# and I guess a bunch of other languages.
- aembleton 5y ago20 years ago, fresh out of uni, my first job was working on some delphi that modified pdfs. With no libraries! That was painful.
- adgjlsfhk1 5y agoFrom what I've seen, most of the libraries out there are some mix of incomplete and slow. From my testing (from a few years ago), most of them supported about 80% of the documents you would see in the wild. Good support for FDF (form fillable PDF) was really bad pretty much across the board.