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
If the question is “why/for what reason are they complicated?” and not “in what ways are they complicated?” then there are two reasons.
The first is they’re made to incorporate a large number of different media types and formats, and allow them to be displayed in a unified and not garbled way. That makes them very complicated.
The second reason is that of security, to intentionally make them very difficult to reverse-engineer or decipher in the exact way that you’ve proposed, without obtaining software from Adobe, inc. Such software typically consists of a series of “binary blobs” or binary executable programs that are provided in machine code, which just looks like a bunch of near meaningless hexadecimal numbers if directly translated into text.
In general Adobe cares about this kind of security not because of amateur level interest like yours, but because criminals and state espionage organizations have a much bigger financial incentive to reverse engineer software and find ways to exploit something like a PDF in order to gain access to other’s computers. Usually, in order to trick a compromized computer’s operating system into installing spy-ware or ransom-ware.
Programs are available that can decompile binary executable files into written source code, but the output tends to be difficult to read at best if not entirely gibberish.
These days, executable files from popular software companies are usually created with internal features to make them deliberately difficult to reverse-engineer or decompile. Good luck getting Adobe to provide you with their own written source code for acrobat, for example. They’ll just hang up.
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