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
**tl;dr:** PDFs are far more complicated internally than most people realize.
For one thing, PDF files are *programs* that, when run, produce a rendered document. It is (or at least used to be) a simplified version of PostScript, another document language.
Being programs, they are not just “lumps of bits” on the disk, they are a potential attack vector. There was a time when the DoD banished them from sensitive installations. Adobe finally got their act together and fixed many (but not all) of the vulnerabilities.
Secondly, many PDFs are simply collections of scans of pages, i.e. they are images. That makes “converting them” to text a bit more complicated, especially if the scans are skewed, dirty, or a little bit out of focus.
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