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PDF is such a weird format. Not so long ago I had to write some Java code for manipulating PDFs: find a string, remove it and place an image at the former strin
by schlowmo 3y ago
PDF is such a weird format. Not so long ago I had to write some Java code for manipulating PDFs: find a string, remove it and place an image at the former string position. I should have known better as I thought "Well, how hard can that be?”
What followed was a deep dive down the rabbit hole, a lot of fiddling with the same tools the author of this gist is using trying to make sense of it all.
The final solution worked better than I thought while at the same time felt incredibly wrong.
I'm very thankful for all the (probably painful) work that went into those open source PDF tools.
- mx_02 3y ago> "Well, how hard can that be?” Very hard? I worked on a tool that generated PDFs based on API responses. The tool added charts from the api data. Those PDFs were reports with some hardcoded text. Yesh what a fun ride that was.
- kccqzy 3y agoGenerating PDFs are incredibly easy. I just generate LaTeX and run it through lualatex. When precise positioning is needed, I just use a giant tikzpicture.