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?
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.
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.
Ah but can you do that on a website?
Try that with a JPEG
Do I look like I know hwhat a JPEG is?
I just want a picture of a got-dang hot dog
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.
The entire tech stack is a tactical mess
Just as crazy as not being able to convert PDF “properly” to docx or other format…
I.e. not crazy at all. We can’t turn strawberry jam into fully formed fruits, either.
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?
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.)
Because you are using the wrong tool. Libreoffice has a dedicated export to PDF button. Other tools do too.
I use File | Save As… in Microsoft Office to get PDFs.
Phones are shitty for that.
Some apps can’t save to a folder on your phone.
So you have to share it with an app but the file manager doesn’t support that.
So you share it with the printing app and then you print the pdf to your phone…
so do Adobe Illustrator and many CAD tools
Is OP still using winrar and notepad++?
Don’t diss Notepad++
All modern printers save documents as a multi-paged image (read: a PDF) in their memory before printing it onto paper. It’s trivial to make the print dialog save a PDF file because you’re telling it to give the file it just made back to the computer instead of giving it to the printer.
I mean why would you build some PDF export stuff when this basic functionality is already available in most browsers.
So if a native application doesn’t support PDF exports, I should open it in a browser?
No, a native (Windows at least) application with print support also has the ability to print to PDF just like the browser does.
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.
I think this is more of an expression of more people printing (and it being prominent in the UI than anything else).
