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Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

alexwlchan.net

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Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#111

Post by rqtwteye »

jl6 wrote: post #68

PDF is a fabulous format. I mean, it’s an awful format in so many ways, technically speaking, but the net effect of having a self-contained static file in your custody stands in blissful contrast to the user-hostile dynamic/SaaS website that can be taken away at a moment’s notice. PDF/A is the true PDF - it strips out most of the dangerous cruft. Anyway, if you like weird PDF hijinks, here’s a polyglot PDF/A CSV file…

“ PDF is a fabulous format”

I will never forgive the pain PDF caused me when I worked on a project to parse millions of PDF files from various sources. Just reconstructing paragraphs was a huge effort not even mentioning parsing tables. I think we should do better for something that’s basically a standard. PDF manuals also suck big time.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#112

Post by wongarsu »

flexagoon wrote: post #89
galaxyLogic wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have the map of US in my cell-phone. I'm somewhat confused by its directions however when I look at the map and want to go somewhere. Is the top-part of the map where I'm moving? Or is the top-part North? Seems it is not North and that is confusing because maps I've seen before have North at the top always. If I turn 90 degrees, the map turns around. But I thought it was I who turned around. And if I stop, the map…

There are two modes in Google Maps - one shows the map in a fixed rotation (north on top by default, but you can rotate the map with two fingers), the other mode automatically rotates the map based on what direction you're facing. *Facing*, not moving, so you don't actually have to walk for it to determine the direction. You can switch between the modes by clicking a compass icon

Part of the confusion might be that it's pointing in the direction the phone is facing. Which is kind of obvious, but notably doesn't work if you put your phone in an upright phone holder, as many people do in their car.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#113

Post by JKCalhoun »

rqtwteye wrote: post #111
jl6 wrote: post #68

PDF is a fabulous format. I mean, it’s an awful format in so many ways, technically speaking, but the net effect of having a self-contained static file in your custody stands in blissful contrast to the user-hostile dynamic/SaaS website that can be taken away at a moment’s notice. PDF/A is the true PDF - it strips out most of the dangerous cruft. Anyway, if you like weird PDF hijinks, here’s a polyglot PDF/A CSV file…

“ PDF is a fabulous format” I will never forgive the pain PDF caused me when I worked on a project to parse millions of PDF files from various sources. Just reconstructing paragraphs was a huge effort not even mentioning parsing tables. I think we should do better for something that’s basically a standard. PDF manuals also suck big time.

PDF is supposed to a be a printer format, not a word processing document format. While I too would love to nail down a PDF subset to be a standard (for example requiring the accessibility tags that make text extraction easy) perhaps trying to create a hybrid format, one that satisfies both printers and resizable windows, is already an impossible goal.

(I've always had to keep my love of PDF a secret from fellow nerds. But here's another secret, I like printing documents out from time to time.)

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#114

Post by JKCalhoun »

amelius wrote: post #92
jl6 wrote: post #68

PDF is a fabulous format. I mean, it’s an awful format in so many ways, technically speaking, but the net effect of having a self-contained static file in your custody stands in blissful contrast to the user-hostile dynamic/SaaS website that can be taken away at a moment’s notice. PDF/A is the true PDF - it strips out most of the dangerous cruft. Anyway, if you like weird PDF hijinks, here’s a polyglot PDF/A CSV file…

PDF is an executable file. Many people are worried about running Javascript but still use PDF files without problems.

For better or worse, the years I spent working on Preview for Apple (and PDFKit) I felt bad that our (Apple's) PDF implementation was far short of Adobe's.

Radars would show up with PDFs attached, "Preview Does Not Display 3D Image in PDF Like Acrobat" or similar. And I would feel so ... inadequate.

PDFKit could render and capture basic annotations ... and that was about it. We could show you forms, allow editing, but if the PDF had Javascript that would add two fields and put the sum in a third field I had to shrug and say, "Oh well." The effort of hoisting a JavaScript interpreter/runtime was beyond my skillset anyway.

But then I kind of came to see our subset of PDF support as a kind of feature. It's true, we left out the kitchen sink. Adobe was/is clearly interested in putting everything into PDF.

And I mean, as pointed out here, at least you could open a PDF in Preview and not worry about any Javascript executing. ;-)

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#115

Post by JKCalhoun »

macropin wrote: post #33

Reminds me of this PDF I created more than a decade ago from a Postscript implementation of the game of life. Seems it still works, but causes MacOS preview to crash. https://andrewcutler.net/docs/joke/life.pdf

Whew! Didn't crash on my Mac OS — just a static Game of Life render. This machine is still on Monterey FWIW.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#118

Post by da_chicken »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #113
rqtwteye wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“ PDF is a fabulous format” I will never forgive the pain PDF caused me when I worked on a project to parse millions of PDF files from various sources. Just reconstructing paragraphs was a huge effort not even mentioning parsing tables. I think we should do better for something that’s basically a standard. PDF manuals also suck big time.

PDF is supposed to a be a printer format, not a word processing document format. While I too would love to nail down a PDF subset to be a standard (for example requiring the accessibility tags that make text extraction easy) perhaps trying to create a hybrid format, one that satisfies both printers and resizable windows, is already an impossible goal. (I've always had to keep my love of PDF a secret from fellow nerds…

I really appreciate what PDF can accomplish, but I also really dislike that it turns into a black box. There really ought to be something that can describe a document structure and also describe document layout in a durable and portable manner. In the range of XML/JSON HTML+CSS PDF PS RAW, it really does feel like there's something missing between HTML and PDF.

And it can't be LaTeX, because the document shouldn't be a programming language at all. "The document is a program" has proven itself to be a terrible scheme overall.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#119

Post by alberto_ol »

theletterf wrote: post #73

This post reminds me of Umberto Eco's intellectual divertissements. More specifically, this fantastic piece, "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1." https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/881694/cb6119367b...

Umberto Eco quoted Jorge Luis Borges:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#120

Post by remoquete »

alberto_ol wrote: post #119
theletterf wrote: post #73

This post reminds me of Umberto Eco's intellectual divertissements. More specifically, this fantastic piece, "On the Impossibility of Drawing a Map of the Empire on a Scale of 1 to 1." https://s3.amazonaws.com/arena-attachments/881694/cb6119367b...

Umberto Eco quoted Jorge Luis Borges: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_Exactitude_in_Science

Yes, though it'd be perhaps more accurate to say it expanded upon the theme, as Wikipedia says.
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