Until you realize that a PDF is literally just a format based around a standard set of instructions used to print documents.
It stands for Print Da File.
Reminds me of Arnold’s guide to tar:
Print Deeznuts Fuckyou
Potable Document Format. Retains formatting and safe to consume.
“safe”
For those not in the know… PDF is a particular set of conventions for delivering peograms written in a programming language called “Postscript”, and like all programs they can be hijacked to trigger unexpected results, including the delivery of software viruses. And yes, while those programs run in “sandboxes” that are supposed to prevent propagation of harm, such environments can fall in that purpose due to creative triggering of imperfections in the sandbox code by the “contained” Postscript code.
Hence, quotes are used to convey lack of trust in the claim of safety.
Why is my PDF file booting the Linux kernel?
What? You didn’t want your portable document format to be Turing complete?
Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them
(I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.
Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”
I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance…
Yeah, if you print to a printer what you’re most often doing is saving it as an Adobe PostScript file and sending that to the printer. PDF is similar, just with extra bells and whistles.
It was like that back in the eighties, until the manufacturers decided to save on the chips by moving functionality into the drivers. Which was basically the start of everyone’s problems with printers.
Im not so sure. I bet more than half of the drivers out there produce PCL output, and there are a lot of printers that use other languages too like ZPL and a myriad of others.
Apple‘s AirPrint standard for wireless printing is pretty much sending a PDF over IPP.
To be fair, they added stuff to it, like selectable text on a scanned page.
Right, as another user said, it’s similar to postscript but with bells and whistles.
“Print to file” to create a PDF, but it’s Microsoft’s stupid alternative format. Can’t even remember its name, nobody used it.
Fucking xps format. Like almost everything Microslop had touched, it can burn in software hell
Agreed! I remember back in the day when they first created the docx format. Such bloated garbage. I think an empty file was like 100-200 KB. And PowerPoint files are unreasonably huge too
I remember seeing an article about how the xlsx format description was several hundred pages in length.
OOXML is over 600 pages, yes. With lots of contradictions and filler words btw. And a “standard” (with scandals abound) that has most of the format as proprietary extensions. And MS Office/365 doesn’t even keep to it, so other office suites never have as good support of the format as MS itself.
Use ODF to save your documents. MS started their “standard” because of it anyway, fearing losses in their customer base (that bound them to Windows).
That’s doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
It’s a hugely important format used by countless archived documents.
We can’t just find out one day that nothing can read xlsx.https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000398.shtml
Actually, nothing can really read xlsx expect from Microsoft themselves. They wanted to get an “open” standard so they could be used in European public administration. But they also did it in a way so that nobody else can really implement their whole standard.
ODT format is way better than DOCX.
That’s not true, although nothing can read it with the accuracy of Excel due to the complexity and lack of documentation on certain features.
Docx is bloated XML, but much better than the binary formats before.
Depends on what you mean by “better”. I have looked at the xml content before and never got the sense I could edit it anyhow, so any perceived benefit to it for me is far outweighed by the ginormous file sizes.
Better for LibreOffice and other software to read and write.
XML isn’t meant to be written by hand.
deleted by creator
The best part is Word for example now by default just outputs a PDF file if you tell it to export an XPS file, which gets extra funny if you have a licensed version of Acrobat installed because Acrobat installs an extension to also export as a PDF except it works worse!
exports are subject to tariffs, only religious people can be saved. So printing is the secular, free trade choice.
I mean, it’s just common sense.
Printing, for the rest of us!
Laughing in LaTeX
Laughing harder in Typst
Typst is great stuff
Really want to migrate, but LyX is too good to give up…
I see you too are a person of culture.
Dude, LaTeX one of the worst piece of software that is still prevalent today, perhaps the only thing worst is Microsoft Word (and similar WYSIWYG thingy).
This video gave me a background on LaTeX I didn’t know about before (didn’t know Knuth was behind it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc
I thought Knuth is the developer of TeX, not LaTeX… That being said, I am not overly fond of the things coming out of Stanford in that generation, like lisp, TeX, and LaTeX.
Because of anonymity, I am gonna voice some strong opinions ;) These tools feels very much like the typical products of “west-coast PL”: they feel hacky, way too flexible and end up doing nothing well, and definitely born out of the whole “hacker culture” and “engineering culture”.
Maybe Scheme and Racket is better, but I never spend the time to look into them.
I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.
Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.
Similarly, Android has distinct “share” and “open with” menus but I mostly use the former as the latter.
What a great shitpost. Fueled a strong comment section. Well done!
I think it’s worse that it’s quicker to take a screenshot of an image online than going through the trouble of saving it.
I can think of several ways I can print a word file to pdf. In the rare occasions I might need a pdf to share. But what I mean is pdf sucks and shouldn’t be allowed on the internet
It’s a fine format for what it’s intended for, exact preservation of content, format, and layout. Once you start looking at a the immutable archivist/distribution format and start thinking to yourself “I’d rather like to edit that” then you’ve messed up.
Boomers made me hate PDF files
the world is run by PDF files
And the people who can’t open them
people will call you dumbass because you don’t use AI but they can’t open a pdf file
From my time in tech support I know there are two kinds of cases where people can’t open a PDF. In one group, the PDF is broken, usually an interrupted download or otherwise corrupted file. The other group, well, one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time.
one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time
They can’t. These are the people who have a family reunion in the middle of aisle 6 in the grocery store because the haven’t seen little Breighlynne since she was this big! We need to get together sometime so all the–
You need to get the hell away from the tortilla chips before I justifiably crash out!
Preach
Who can’t open PDFs nowadays that even browsers have a pdf reader built in.
Having worked at a bank, everything is PDF files. All the billions of dollars in loans, assets, and accounts etc. it’s all PDF files of agreements and terms. The entire finance industry would be heavily destabilized if the industry somehow rug pulled them on PDFs
Adobe made me hate pdf files.
Most boomers I known would happily send you a docx to sign digitally. So I have to open word to save their crap to PDF to open it in Acrobat to sign it and send it back. They probably wouldnt even notice if I changed the terms in the meantime.
Did you used to love pdf files?
Back when they were cool
How much more do we need to pick your brain in order to determine whether or not you understand the double entendre?
I enjoy single entendres, I’m not greedy
Is that a JE reference?
I discovered on Macs, you can unlock a “protected” PDF this way. Just open the PDF in Safari, File > Print > Save as PDF. It outputs a PDF that’s identical, except it’s unlocked (it doesn’t get converted to a bunch of raster images).
Pretty sure that works on all OSes.
Pdf24 let’s you just mass import pdfs and unlock them without destroying things like bookmarks and the text. I’m sure there’s other similar options.
One time nothing really worked I used a pikepdf python lib. Open file -> Guess pass -> Resave. I was surprised it’s that simple.
Who remembers printing to a Postscript file and then running that through Acrobat to get a PDF? Back in the 90s when PDFs had to be explained.
Or alternatively, why don’t we run with that approach? So many things would benefit from “save to text”. A bit farther afield but why not save to image, save to html, etc.
We should. It’s a good abstractions for document conversion.
Writing that PDF into an USB device or into a new file are basically the same thing…
Lol …accurate
What? I just click export.
Sometimes people have things saved to Google drive with the setting to save disabled but allow printing. Which means you can just print to pdf. Only case where I can think of where printing to PDF is the easiest option.
