“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
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.
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.
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!
What a great shitpost. Fueled a strong comment section. Well done!
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.
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” Than you’ve messed up.
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.
fwiw its trivial to OCR it. single click in many pdf software.
but I guess it slows down some people
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.
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?
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
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.
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.
Then you already know this:
I love that the goat sacrifice is before replacing the cable…
Can we get a second opinion from the head of saving operations?
That department was cut for financial reasons.
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.
Similarly, Android has distinct “share” and “open with” menus but I mostly use the former as the latter.
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”
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.
Why is my PDF file booting the Linux kernel?
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.
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.
Apple‘s AirPrint standard for wireless printing is pretty much sending a PDF over IPP.
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.
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.
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
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
Adobe made me hate pdf files.
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.
Tech muggle here.
Could we just get rid of PDFs and switch to word docs and spread sheets instead? I know this will likely cause a slurry of consequences, especially in professional circles, but have you considered: fuck it.?
K thx bye.
Can we just create a standard that is content-centric and not representation-centric? We have screenshots nowadays for that.
Lighweight Markups are a good start. Pack it in a zip to carry media and good.
Yes, i hate multi-column text. It messes with my focus, makes the text harder to read. While others love them. Let me read it on my terms.
Those have different purposes. Word/Excel documents are meant to be editable so that anybody who opens the file is able to add to it, etc. A PDF is effectively the opposite. A PDF is generally meant to be an immutable document that looks the same in any program that you use to open the file.
A screenshot does that. DOS had no screenshots, but now we have them.
I mean, fucking with a PDF isn’t exactly arcane knowledge, even after it’s been signed. It’s just cumbersome and tedious and requires counterintuitive actions like pressing Ctrl+P instead of Ctrl+S.
If their purpose is to be secure, they’re shit at their job.
The purpose of a PDF is not security, obfuscation, etc. If you NEED to manipulate a PDF, then sure, it is technically possible to do so. But it takes knowledge and effort to do so. As you say, it’s cumbersome, tedious, and counterintuitive. The primary purpose of a PDF is to be a read-only document that looks the same regardless of the screen resolution, the fonts that are installed, etc. On the other hand, Word/Excel documents are designed to be as simple as possible for anybody to edit as needed at any point, with the downside of being affected by things like screen size, fonts installed, etc.
That’s sort of like saying “I’m overheating because my apartment is 32ᵒC, let’s turn on the heating and see how we feel once it’s 45ᵒC”
Critical temperature = user friendly. TIL.
No please, microsoft already has a monopoly I’d much rather the standard be open
Open Office? Libre Office?
What if I don’t want to spend several hundred dollars per year to use a proprietary program that doesn’t run on my computer just to look at some documents?
Open Office? Libre Office?
Are fine, but not 100% compatible with all Office files and very heavyweight for viewing a document.
The problem is that Office file formats are an “open” standard but not a real open standard. PDF is.
Edit: Hell, not even all Office files are openable in all modern versions of Office. I have an Excel file I have to use once a quarter that will only open in locally installed versions of Office, not Office365. I keep a VM with Windows on it just for this one file.
PDF is still shit, despite being open. Even a “minimal” viewer like mupdf has to carry a 100MB library with it. Interpreting them is arcane knowledge.
Oh I agree, I’m not saying that PDF is some sort of document format perfection. But it is a fully open one with a spec that fits in 250 pages, as opposed to docx’s 7500(!!) page spec with undocumented binary blobs mixed in.
Meanwhile, Commonmark… whoa, still 126 pages printed as pdf, with all edge cases. Though they do want to be well-specified.
Excel sheets are rarely accessible to screen readers. Word documents are pretty good, but tedious if you’re just trying to like read something. PDF has the best accessibility support around (except HTML, but thats a whole other can of worms).
Sounds like screen readers need some improvement.
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.
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.
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.
