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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

#31

Post by maxerickson »

kirubakaran wrote: post #26
maxerickson wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF readers are probably mostly pretty hardened against "naive" non-conforming content.

> probably mostly pretty hardened Quite possibly perhaps that might be true-ish to some extent, I think, but take that with a grain of salt, I'm not an expert, that's just my wild guess :-p

It's pretty ridiculous to peel that off the following qualifier.

Readers have been aggressively attacked for a long time. It's certainly not impossible that some basic demonstration PDF will cause an issue, but it's probably not reasonable to expect it.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#32

Post by codeflo »

I take offense to that diagram; Germany should refuse to be covered by a PDF that's not in proper DIN format.

In theory, DIN paper sizes go all the way from subatomic to the size of the universe. It seems like A(-39) is barely too small to cover Germany's land mass, but A(-40) should be more than sufficient. That's 882 x 1247 km if I didn't miscalculate.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#34

Post by MichaelZuo »

tremarley wrote: post #27

“But unlike Acrobat, the Preview app doesn’t have an upper limit on what we can put in MediaBox. It’s perfectly happy for me to write a width which is a 1 followed by twelve 0s: Screenshot of Preview’s Document inspector, showing the page size of 352777777777.78 x 10.59 cm. If you’re curious, that width is approximately the distance between the Earth and the Moon. I’d have to get my ruler to check, but I’m pretty sur…

Now I wonder how large of a file size would such a PDF be if it wasn't empty space...

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#35

Post by chaxor »

anotheraccount9 wrote: post #14

For a moment I wasn't sure if I wanted to click on the link.

On an only slightly related note: is there any good way to check PDFs for malware/executables?

If I'm stuck with an attempt at it, the best I can think of is opening in a new QEMU or docker with no Internet access, but that's 1) a fair but of work to check something, and 2) probably not even that secure. Using some cli tool, like xxx, bat, or ranger, that does some processing to extract the text and looking at just that feels more secure - but I know it really isn't.

What is a simple tool to "clean" PDFs? An ML tool that does QEMU/docker/no-net to extract the content, turns that into game, and saves a typst/latex template with it would probably be the best possible outcome - but that's a decent (yet potentially very lucrative) task.

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#36

Post by defrost »

staplung wrote: post #9
kepano wrote: post #4

I cannot let this opportunity go by without quoting On Exactitude in Science by Borges in its entirety ". . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size w…

Or a portion of one of it's inspirations: Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno Concluded "We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!" "Have you used it much?" I enquired. "It has never been spread out, yet," said Mein Herr: "the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight ! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it doe…

Also Carroll, from The Hunting of the Snark

    He had bought a large map representing the sea,

    Without the least vestige of land

    And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be

    A map they could all understand.


    “What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?”
    
    So the Bellman would cry

    and the crew would reply

    “They are merely conventional signs!


    “Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!

    But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank

    (So the crew would protest) that he’s bought us the best

    A perfect and absolute blank!”

Re: Making a PDF that's larger than Germany

#38

Post by pas »

MichaelZuo wrote: post #34
tremarley wrote: post #27

“But unlike Acrobat, the Preview app doesn’t have an upper limit on what we can put in MediaBox. It’s perfectly happy for me to write a width which is a 1 followed by twelve 0s: Screenshot of Preview’s Document inspector, showing the page size of 352777777777.78 x 10.59 cm. If you’re curious, that width is approximately the distance between the Earth and the Moon. I’d have to get my ruler to check, but I’m pretty sur…

Now I wonder how large of a file size would such a PDF be if it wasn't empty space...

pdf supports vector graphics! or it can be just a lot of "a" characters, it supports compression/repeat, right?
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