If it’s stupid but works it is not stupid :)
you’re printing it to disk. this is a trick as old as time. like piping.
i mean, yeah. turned out to be a pretty good way to make pdf conversion accessible to a lot of people and make it convenient to convert it and print it all from one spot.
Print Dat File
Tell me you don’t use Pandoc without telling me you don’t use Pandoc.
I would miss the little ruse tbh. Keep my computer guessing, it’s trying to know me too much lately.
To print, these days, you generate PostScript and fire that off to the printer.
PostScript -> PDF is a very light translation.
The biggest slight is not renaming print to Print/PDF and just shortcutting the same exact code.
Hey, if it works why fix?
Microslop is pretty good at “fixing” shit that isnt broken
You’re not lying to your computer. A PDF is a print. It’s just on screen instead of on paper.
Not on screen, on storage usually.
Because PDF is literally that, a compressed print. it is not for editing, forms or anything it is a representation of a print.
Just as crazy as not being able to convert PDF “properly” to docx or other format…
It isn’t crazy, Adobe has copyrighted PDFs.
They locked it down so hard. The only way to mess with it is with pirated software.
No, that’s not actually the issue. The PDF format is open.
The actual (non-)issue is that PDF is a format that is not meant to be converted or otherwise be edited. Let’s say you have a page of text with two columns. For a PDF, the concept of columns doesn’t exist. It’s just a series of individual letters placed exactly in a specific location on a page (and other graphical elements I guess, but that’s not the current point). I think strictly speaking PDFs don’t have to use the space character, since PDF doesn’t have the concept of a word, just individually placed letters.
Readers already have to do some heuristics to allow copying etc. but how are you going to convert this into a word file? How would you detect that there are text columns? What is a page header / footer and what is just fancy repeating letters?
Note that as soon as you get into more modern PDF, there’s also stuff like accessibility features (big fun!). There is support for Universal 3D.
Nobody sane would try to write a proper editor for PDF. You only write that if you want to make money off of it because a corporation somewhere doesn’t understand or control the pipeline that created a PDF that they need changed.
Onlyoffice (vibe coded trash [that works]) allows you to do this. You can also just straight up edit most PDFs I’ve run through it. The exception is if its a collection of images, which many PDFs unfortunately are.
If it works, then why is it vibe coded trash? Do you mean anything coded with AI is trash by default despite literally no one solving this problem manually for 30 fucking years?
Code can work but still be trash. The important question is whether it’s actually maintainable. Can issues be fixed without creating more problems? Is it archiected to allow likely new features to be added without having to rebuild large parts of the code? Trash can certainly be produced by humans too, but LLMs don’t really take any of this into consideration, as they don’t think, so they have a very high chance of producing trash.
I didn’t mean to say trash. That was muscle memory. Most of the vibe-coded projects I’ve used have been trash.
(There are other pdf editors, it’s not an unsolved problem, however as others pointed out pdf is a sort of print as a definition. Like saving a .txt as a .png. Whoever made a png/pdf did that purposely. Also you can even ocr any print/pdf for like 30 years.)
I.e. not crazy at all. We can’t turn strawberry jam into fully formed fruits, either.
File → Export PDF?
What? Libreoffice has had this one since always.
Same with Word and any of the other Office products.
Seems like a standard feature in any document managing software.
I’ve found that exporting to PDF sometimes has inconsistent results vs passing it thru the systems print dialog. Like sometimes fonts fail to render or locations/margins get messed up when “exported” since that’s the softwares built in interpreter.
Ah but can you do that on a website?
Try that with a JPEG
Do you pronounce that like JPEG or JPEG?
Only a moron pronounces it like JPEG.
I’d assume you have some image processing software that can create image containers, in which case it would most likely support PDF.
But yeah the question would be finding the one.
Do I look like I know hwhat a JPEG is?
I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog
The entire tech stack is a tactical mess
Also still the best way to record audio from anything, including MUSIC SOFTWARE to create a loop back sound device :) if it works, it works…
Linux.
Linux, never changes.
Linux still has this issue
Not if you first save all the code as a pdf & compile it manually from that.
