Adaptive PDFs • Hacker News Board

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#11

Post by al_hag » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 5:40 PM UTC

In the US, publicly funded organizations are required to code their PDF with semantic structure to support machine access by screen readers and other assistive technologies [1], [2].

Given the low adherence to accessibility standards e.g. in academic publishing [3], LLM parsing needs creating a commercial incentive for comparable structured access would be marvelous.

[1] https://www.section508.gov/create/pdfs/common-tags-and-usage...

[2] https://pdfa.org/resource/tagged-pdf-best-practice-guide-syn...

[3] https://arxiv.org/html/2410.03022v1

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#12

Post by dredmorbius » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 5:42 PM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #4

I would suggest changing the title to the actual title of the article: Adaptive PDFs. Assuming the program works, the PDF will not actually look different to me than to anyone else looking at it, so there is nothing that "changes based on who is reading". It is just that text extraction, a wholly different (and much fuzzier) process than viewing the PDF, and something that the same person can do, will now return stru…

Email the mods: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40493683>.

hn@ycombinator.com

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#13

Post by Xotic007 » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 5:46 PM UTC

Cool but it's relying on every extractor honoring that replacement-text property which you said yourself is hit or miss. So it's clean markdown until someone runs it through a tool that ignores it and quietly gets the messy version and has no idea that happened.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#14

Post by mc32 » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 5:48 PM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #4

I would suggest changing the title to the actual title of the article: Adaptive PDFs. Assuming the program works, the PDF will not actually look different to me than to anyone else looking at it, so there is nothing that "changes based on who is reading". It is just that text extraction, a wholly different (and much fuzzier) process than viewing the PDF, and something that the same person can do, will now return stru…

Having slightly different versions would certainly be a help in identifying leakers of certain kinds of documents to increase the odds of identifying leakers. That would be of interest to some kinds of organizations or departments within organizations.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#15

Post by Tomte » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 5:49 PM UTC

> LaTeX, Chrome's print-to-PDF, most export tools don't produce tags

LaTeX is actually one of the best ways to create tagged PDF: https://latex3.github.io/tagging-project/tagging-status/ and https://www.overleaf.com/learn/latex/An_introduction_to_tagg...

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#16

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 5:54 PM UTC

jexp wrote: post #8

Shouldn’t it be possible since forever to put machine readable source information into PDF metadata. It’s more a problem of the tools and programs generating the PDFs. We spend millions turning structured information into PDFs and billions to extract the same data from a printer rendering language

Exactly. It’s pretty insane that we have converged on storing documents as PDF. And it looks like no work is done on making PDF files machine readable.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#17

Post by vjvjvjvjghv » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 5:55 PM UTC

iLoveOncall wrote: post #9

I'd be more interested in the contrary. A PDF that ensures it's only readable by humans. I guess the exact same technique can actually be used.

What would that be good for? If a human can read it, you can also use OCR.

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#18

Post by fsckboy » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 6:00 PM UTC

>This didn't matter when humans were the only readers. But now most PDFs end up in an LLM.

but it did matter, a lot. the PDF format was originally proprietary and was designed to be proprietary and to disallow casual text extraction. I just didn't like the way you glossed over that, "it was OK that people for over 30 years were not given any way for the information they were given to be unshackled, but now it matters because our AI overlords were prefer that so we must change things!"

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#19

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 6:03 PM UTC

jexp wrote: post #8

Shouldn’t it be possible since forever to put machine readable source information into PDF metadata. It’s more a problem of the tools and programs generating the PDFs. We spend millions turning structured information into PDFs and billions to extract the same data from a printer rendering language

[deleted]

Re: Adaptive PDFs

#20

Post by tombert » Fri, Jun 12, 2026, 6:08 PM UTC

I always export my Typst with PDF/A. It basically guarantees maximal compatibility and none of the annoying dynamic bullshit. I wish everyone would do this, at least for documents that don't need the fancy dynamic PDF features.