I made a passing comment of asking how hard it would be to convert a pdf file to another file format by writing a discord bot for it (for our ttrpg game) and one of the players said “Hell, because pdfs are madness inside.”
Can someone explain to me why pdfs are so weird?
Edit: a typo
In: 185
Software engineer here, I have been working with PDF files for the majority of my career. I believe the main reason why converting PDF files to other formats would be hell, and most certainly It would be, is because of the sheer number of variations you can have inside a PDF. Acrobat itself struggles to keep up with the PDF specs (at least it did in the past).
The need to make the format portable and thus self-contained and at the same time versatile and multi-purpose, has led to a specification which is so complex that no software can be even be sure to support all its flavours and nouances, let alone interpret them consistently.
Writing PDF files is relatively easy, as you can choose to do it as simply as you like; reading them is the hard part, and by far.
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