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A comment on PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools.

Re:PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools by devy on Sunday October 09, 2022 @07:47PM (#33146396)
Amazing share on the tooling side of thing for PDF processing.

More on PDF and why it's hard to do analysis [1]. TL;DR

     "PDF was never really designed as a data input format, 
      but rather, it was designed as an output format 
      giving fine grained control over the resulting document."
By the way, the PDF 1.4 (most widely used version) specification is over 1000 pages![2] To make it even harder, not everybody follow the spec :)

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33146364

[2] https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/pdfstandard...

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools by bee_rider on Sunday October 09, 2022 @08:50PM (#33146750)
Yeah I think 95% of the time, the correct way to fix a problem with a PDF is to go back to the tool that generated it, and fix the issue in the input. But, sometimes non-ideal circumstances intervene.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools by perelin on Tuesday October 11, 2022 @05:14PM (#33169336)
Make that 99%
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:PDF processing and analysis with open-source tools by jimjimjim on Sunday October 09, 2022 @10:33PM (#33147215)
yes, until very recently, if what adobe acrobat/reader did was different to the spec then the spec was wrong. Very hard to tell a client that their document is corrupted when they can read it just fine in adobe.
[ Parent | on HN ]