alt Hacker NewsThanks for this. Really quells the urge I get every so often to just code my own PDF editor, because they all suck and certainly it couldn't be THAT hard. Such hubris!
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Don't stop yourself before getting started. I believe in you - maybe you could write the one editor that would actually work!
Not kidding - it's a ~~~billion dollar market haha
Make an MVP/Show HN :-)
I did a bunch of work creating pdfs using a low-level API, object goes here stuff.
As far as I understand it, at its core, pdf is just a stream of instructions that is continually modifying the document. You can insert a thousand objects before you start the next word in a paragraph. And this is just the most basic stuff. Anything on a page can be anywhere in the stream. I don't know if you can go back and edit previous pages, you might have a shot at least trying to understand one page at a time.
Did you know you can have embedded XML in PDFs? You can have a paper form with all the data filled in and include an XML version of that for any computer systems that would like an easier way to read it.
The blog post about adding colour gradients to Typst dives into some of the weirdness of the format. https://typst.app/blog/2023/color-gradients
Bravo to you for recognising the load-bearing 'just' before you threw it around :)
Heh, have at it, here's the full spec: https://developer.adobe.com/document-services/docs/assets/5b...
Should take... a weekend tops? ;) PDF is crazy and scary