I can think of several ways I can print a word file to pdf. In the rare occasions I might need a pdf to share. But what I mean is pdf sucks and shouldn’t be allowed on the internet
It’s a fine format for what it’s intended for, exact preservation of content, format, and layout. Once you start looking at a the immutable archivist/distribution format and start thinking to yourself “I’d rather like to edit that” then you’ve messed up.
What a great shitpost. Fueled a strong comment section. Well done!
“Print to file” to create a PDF, but it’s Microsoft’s stupid alternative format. Can’t even remember its name, nobody used it.
Fucking xps format. Like almost everything Microslop had touched, it can burn in software hell
The best part is Word for example now by default just outputs a PDF file if you tell it to export an XPS file, which gets extra funny if you have a licensed version of Acrobat installed because Acrobat installs an extension to also export as a PDF except it works worse!
Agreed! I remember back in the day when they first created the docx format. Such bloated garbage. I think an empty file was like 100-200 KB. And PowerPoint files are unreasonably huge too
Docx is bloated XML, but much better than the binary formats before.
Depends on what you mean by “better”. I have looked at the xml content before and never got the sense I could edit it anyhow, so any perceived benefit to it for me is far outweighed by the ginormous file sizes.
Better for LibreOffice and other software to read and write.
XML isn’t meant to be written by hand.
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I remember seeing an article about how the xlsx format description was several hundred pages in length.
OOXML is over 600 pages, yes. With lots of contradictions and filler words btw. And a “standard” (with scandals abound) that has most of the format as proprietary extensions. And MS Office/365 doesn’t even keep to it, so other office suites never have as good support of the format as MS itself.
Use ODF to save your documents. MS started their “standard” because of it anyway, fearing losses in their customer base (that bound them to Windows).
That’s doesn’t seem unreasonable to me.
It’s a hugely important format used by countless archived documents.
We can’t just find out one day that nothing can read xlsx.https://www.loc.gov/preservation/digital/formats/fdd/fdd000398.shtml
Actually, nothing can really read xlsx expect from Microsoft themselves. They wanted to get an “open” standard so they could be used in European public administration. But they also did it in a way so that nobody else can really implement their whole standard.
ODT format is way better than DOCX.
That’s not true, although nothing can read it with the accuracy of Excel due to the complexity and lack of documentation on certain features.
You’re not lying. You are printing it as a PDF. Your electronic buddy doesn’t see a difference.
Postscript (not the P in PDF, even though I think it should have been) is how Portable Document Format is made.
PostScript’s original purpose was for formatting documents to print with laser printers, but to also interpret font hinting and display features for lower resolution printing. But it required printers to process them before rasterization.
It was so good at this that it made sense to also use it for the much lower resolution of computer screens once computers were powerful enough to do the rasterization themselves. Hence the PDF replacing most .PS (PostScript) files, unless you were a graphic design student in the late 90s.
Oh boy, here i go learning again
Beyond that, also, what’s so hard about clicking on “File > Export As… > PDF” which is literally in the file menu on LibreOffice at the very least. I don’t know about MS Office, but I would assume it’s the same.
It can produce different results than print to pdf unfortunately
Could you expand on that, I’m curious because export to PDF has always worked flawlessly for me.
Depends on the application. Print to PDF always produces the output as seen on screen, though without things like fillable fields.
Unless you change print options of course, depending on what you’re trying to accomplish it can get really weird.
Output corruption sometimes persists across all different modes of printing/exporting. Some lines in Word starting to go vertical for no reason is one I encountered a lot, the other is Excel insisting on making every cell it’s own list, and it’s usually fixable only by force rebuilding the file container by saving as another doc/docx type, pushing Word to make it from the scratch and drop traces of accumulated file corruption. Funny enough, some of these bugs can’t be reproduced if opened in Libre, that made me prefer it, when applicable, a long time ago.
I was helping someone and both export and print to pdf each messed up different minute aspects of the design/layout. I don’t remember what exactly it was tho sorrx
Print to pdf generally loses the text and just makes it an image though. Which can balloon size and prevent ctrl+f without running ocr on it and saving an additional layer with more mistakes than the original.
Are you sure you don’t have “print as image” enabled there? It should keep it as a layered PDF, not rasterizing.
I probably did. Think I’ve had some things not print correctly without that on an actual printer so I turned that on sometimes?
I deliberately use the print as image feature if I don’t want someone to be able to select text or search the document (like if I’m sending something with sensitive info as an attachment to an email). Most of the time, I have that option disabled so the document can be searchable and text can be copied from it.
Gmail reads the images with OCR and adds it to search terms. Your steps are a noble effort to increase reverse engineering effort, however there are image to text desktop apps now so that effort on the receivers side is almost nothing these days.
fwiw its trivial to OCR it. single click in many pdf software.
but I guess it slows down some people
I’m going to assume you’re on the younger side. That’s a relatively recent thing. For many many years we had to install PDF printers.
Also the PDF printer is generic, but the export has to implemented for each application individually.
Just reading that name made my articulations ache.
It’s great is still active though.
Still using it today whenever I need to flatten a PDF with my scanned signature.
Why do you need to flatten it?
So that the recipient can’t tell it was an image I pasted onto the pdf instead of a page I printed, signed, then scanned in again.
I’m in my forties. The post we are talking about was made in February 2026. Priyanka Lakhara definitely looks younger than me, didn’t even make her Twitter account until January 2024.
What does age or how it worked in the past have to do with a post made… four days ago by someone who is either late twenties to mid-thirties at most?
Also, in those old timey wimey years I was just pirating Adobe Acrobat.
The age comment is not about the age of the posts, but about how you seem so surprised about printing as PDF rather than export as PDF.
Using a virtual printer was the norm until relatively recently, and even then it’s still the most effective because anything than can print can use that to generate a PDF.
That’s how I still create PDFs honestly.
Didn’t want you offend, sorry if came out wrong
No offense taken, just confused because I never had this many problems with PDFs, but as I said, I was pirating Adobe Acrobat for a long, long time so maybe I just didn’t run into as many issues.
Well, but we’re not just talking about Office. What about browsers, document viewers, etc.
My browser saves PDFs fine?
How about notepad. Or paint.
oop probably meant from websites
Kids today don’t realize how much “printing” to files your computer does.
Heh, we were doing some cosigner banking and I asks my one adult kid to send me the bank documents needed (they were pdf files on their computer). They sent me low res screen shots. Lol
Just tell them it’s like the Share button on their phone.
This is as much linguistic tomfoolery for humans as it is a con for computers.
I dont know the history, but the most likely case is some microsoft engineer implemented the “print as pdf” option to get around an adobe restriction in the far past, and now we have this weird convention where you can “print” to only 1 filetype to “save” it.
Someone else pointed out that printing to pdf was a universal solution no matter the program. Instead of each program having to make their own export option.
Thats not 100% correct. This didnt use to be an option, nor is pdf the default printing “format” used by printers. Thats more PCL.
“Print to pdf” was added to Windows at some point after PDF became a common file format.
What? I’m saying it was added because it was independent of the program. You could print to pdf from anywhere be it word, or notepad, or tax software, or a browser, or whatever shitty proprietary program you had. Instead of waiting for each of those programs to add an export as PDF option. I have no idea what you misinterpreted that into.
When you are saving it as a .txt file, you are printing it as a .txt file, the computer sees no difference.
Not how printing as pdf works but I appreciate the effort
I’m sorry but I am the head of printing operations at work and I can assure you, that is exactly how computers work.
Can we get a second opinion from the head of saving operations?
That department was cut for financial reasons.
Then you already know this:
I love that the goat sacrifice is before replacing the cable…
Oh! Apologies sir. I didn’t realize you were the one casting the printer summoning seances from that side of the veil. You know if you ever need support you can draw out the four runes on the back of the book.
I haven’t looked at the printer driver interface on various different operating systens, but I imagine programmatically you don’t write ACSII text directly to it, the way you would with file io calls. Though on Linux you have “lpr” where you can pipe text directly to the command. It’s possible a printer could natively support this, but clearly it would be a different interface to render anything more complex than ascii text.
Err you are handing the file off to a pdf converter programm that acts like a print driver. So yes you are lying to your text programm
pdf is a container format for code parsed by printers. there are no lies, just a virtual printer.
It is all imaginary numbers inside virtual computers which don’t really exist. Pdf is an intermediary portal to the physical realm, but beware! For it is one created by the dark forces of the human psyche. Not all is as it first may seem, it may unexpectedly take possession of the user! (Cue ominous music!)
Until you realize that a PDF is literally just a format based around a standard set of instructions used to print documents.
It stands for Print Da File.
Reminds me of Arnold’s guide to tar:
Print Deeznuts Fuckyou
Potable Document Format. Retains formatting and safe to consume.
“safe”
Why is my PDF file booting the Linux kernel?
What? You didn’t want your portable document format to be Turing complete?
For those not in the know… PDF is a particular set of conventions for delivering peograms written in a programming language called “Postscript”, and like all programs they can be hijacked to trigger unexpected results, including the delivery of software viruses. And yes, while those programs run in “sandboxes” that are supposed to prevent propagation of harm, such environments can fall in that purpose due to creative triggering of imperfections in the sandbox code by the “contained” Postscript code.
Hence, quotes are used to convey lack of trust in the claim of safety.
Next time someone asks me what PDF stands for, this is what I will tell them
(I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve been asked what PDF stands for, because my comment would suggest it is a thing that happens often.
Doofensmirtz_meme.jpeg: “if I had a nickel for every time someone asked me what PDF stood for, I’d have two nickels. — which isn’t much, but it’s weird that it happened twice”
I think I’m just most people’s token techy friend. Or more specifically, I’m the techy friend who also knows loads of random shit and really enjoys answering random questions)
Enhance. Enhance. Enhance…
Yeah, if you print to a printer what you’re most often doing is saving it as an Adobe PostScript file and sending that to the printer. PDF is similar, just with extra bells and whistles.
Apple‘s AirPrint standard for wireless printing is pretty much sending a PDF over IPP.
It was like that back in the eighties, until the manufacturers decided to save on the chips by moving functionality into the drivers. Which was basically the start of everyone’s problems with printers.
Im not so sure. I bet more than half of the drivers out there produce PCL output, and there are a lot of printers that use other languages too like ZPL and a myriad of others.
To be fair, they added stuff to it, like selectable text on a scanned page.
Right, as another user said, it’s similar to postscript but with bells and whistles.
Laughing in LaTeX
Laughing harder in Typst
Typst is great stuff
Really want to migrate, but LyX is too good to give up…
I see you too are a person of culture.
Dude, LaTeX one of the worst piece of software that is still prevalent today, perhaps the only thing worst is Microsoft Word (and similar WYSIWYG thingy).
This video gave me a background on LaTeX I didn’t know about before (didn’t know Knuth was behind it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y65FRxE7uMc
I thought Knuth is the developer of TeX, not LaTeX… That being said, I am not overly fond of the things coming out of Stanford in that generation, like lisp, TeX, and LaTeX.
Because of anonymity, I am gonna voice some strong opinions ;) These tools feels very much like the typical products of “west-coast PL”: they feel hacky, way too flexible and end up doing nothing well, and definitely born out of the whole “hacker culture” and “engineering culture”.
Maybe Scheme and Racket is better, but I never spend the time to look into them.
I assumed LaTex is a descendant of TeX. I’m not really well informed about the history of this kind of stuff, which is why I found it interesting.
Your POV is also interesting, as I always kind of held “hacker culture,” in pretty high regard. But, now that I think about it, I see the appeal of rigorous, well studied things, built very deliberately, on strong foundations. I guess that’s why I instinctively like things like Haskell, the kind of ML with provable bounds, information theory, etc. I’ve never messed around with Lisp-like languages, but I remember my ML-focused advisor speaking of them from when symbolic-AI and self-modifying code was all the rage.
Similarly, Android has distinct “share” and “open with” menus but I mostly use the former as the latter.
exports are subject to tariffs, only religious people can be saved. So printing is the secular, free trade choice.
I mean, it’s just common sense.
Printing, for the rest of us!
I think it’s worse that it’s quicker to take a screenshot of an image online than going through the trouble of saving it.
Boomers made me hate PDF files
Adobe made me hate pdf files.
the world is run by PDF files
And the people who can’t open them
people will call you dumbass because you don’t use AI but they can’t open a pdf file
From my time in tech support I know there are two kinds of cases where people can’t open a PDF. In one group, the PDF is broken, usually an interrupted download or otherwise corrupted file. The other group, well, one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time.
one wonders how this kind of people can walk and talk at the same time
They can’t. These are the people who have a family reunion in the middle of aisle 6 in the grocery store because the haven’t seen little Breighlynne since she was this big! We need to get together sometime so all the–
You need to get the hell away from the tortilla chips before I justifiably crash out!
Preach
Who can’t open PDFs nowadays that even browsers have a pdf reader built in.
Having worked at a bank, everything is PDF files. All the billions of dollars in loans, assets, and accounts etc. it’s all PDF files of agreements and terms. The entire finance industry would be heavily destabilized if the industry somehow rug pulled them on PDFs
Most boomers I known would happily send you a docx to sign digitally. So I have to open word to save their crap to PDF to open it in Acrobat to sign it and send it back. They probably wouldnt even notice if I changed the terms in the meantime.
Did you used to love pdf files?
Is that a JE reference?
Back when they were cool
How much more do we need to pick your brain in order to determine whether or not you understand the double entendre?
I enjoy single entendres, I’m not greedy
I discovered on Macs, you can unlock a “protected” PDF this way. Just open the PDF in Safari, File > Print > Save as PDF. It outputs a PDF that’s identical, except it’s unlocked (it doesn’t get converted to a bunch of raster images).
Pretty sure that works on all OSes.
Pdf24 let’s you just mass import pdfs and unlock them without destroying things like bookmarks and the text. I’m sure there’s other similar options.
One time nothing really worked I used a pikepdf python lib. Open file -> Guess pass -> Resave. I was surprised it’s that simple.
But it’s not anymore. All of the main browsers let you save it directly.
How? The only options under “Save” that I see are ways to save the page as
htmlor whatever. Nothing forpdfThe application (or browser functionality) showing you the PDF should offer a button for that. However, the website might customize or replace that application to prevent it to give you a download button.
But, those functionalities (PDF viewing) are mostly in the client, so you need the PDF file locally anyway, so you might find it in the Network tab in the web developer tools (F12).
Oh, I think I understand the confusion here. OOP here isn’t talking about viewing a PDF online and then downloading that PDF file. They are talking about viewing an arbitrary web page (HTML or whatever) and wanting to save that webpage as a PDF file. Obviously, basically any PDF viewer in a web browser offers a simple button to download the file. But if I want to save a PDF copy of this Lemmy thread, for example, the best method is to print the page to PDF.
Yes, I misremembered/misread the original text. Thank you for noticing me.
Who remembers printing to a Postscript file and then running that through Acrobat to get a PDF? Back in the 90s when PDFs had to be explained.
Or alternatively, why don’t we run with that approach? So many things would benefit from “save to text”. A bit farther afield but why not save to image, save to html, etc.
We should. It’s a good abstractions for document conversion.
Writing that PDF into an USB device or into a new file are basically the same thing…
