(And yet another good reason to avoid the PDF format entirely.)
5 Comments
Worse thing is many computers ship with old versions installed as shovelware, with no auto-updating program installed for the poor users who don’t know to trash it, and use Google Docs to read anything PDF that you somehow need to read so at least it’ll exploit Google rather than your local system. 😉
PDF was a second-system effect of PostScript, in some ways a good idea, in a lot of ways a real bad one in terms of exploitation – though to be fair it the format was written before consumer internet.
oh yeah, and you can’t write a mandelbrot display program in PDF and you can in PostScript. 😉
Of course, that makes PostScript pretty exploitable too, but at least it’s not a large, complex, opaque binary format…
Don’t worry, I’m sure there will eventually be a third system that fixes all of these problems… while introducing new and novel ones, of course. 😉
Well, Microsoft has their own non-portable document format, XPS, made of XML and standardized but probably mangled by MS in some way to make it proprietary as they always do… 😉
Windows prints to a file of it by default if you have no printer drivers installed now. I’ve never seen anyone foolish enough to use it besides Microsoft, however, and although I haven’t looked at it I doubt it’s any sort of improvement other than for Windows lock-in.
Worse thing is many computers ship with old versions installed as shovelware, with no auto-updating program installed for the poor users who don’t know to trash it, and use Google Docs to read anything PDF that you somehow need to read so at least it’ll exploit Google rather than your local system. 😉
PDF was a second-system effect of PostScript, in some ways a good idea, in a lot of ways a real bad one in terms of exploitation – though to be fair it the format was written before consumer internet.
oh yeah, and you can’t write a mandelbrot display program in PDF and you can in PostScript. 😉
Of course, that makes PostScript pretty exploitable too, but at least it’s not a large, complex, opaque binary format…
Don’t worry, I’m sure there will eventually be a third system that fixes all of these problems… while introducing new and novel ones, of course. 😉
Well, Microsoft has their own non-portable document format, XPS, made of XML and standardized but probably mangled by MS in some way to make it proprietary as they always do… 😉
Windows prints to a file of it by default if you have no printer drivers installed now. I’ve never seen anyone foolish enough to use it besides Microsoft, however, and although I haven’t looked at it I doubt it’s any sort of improvement other than for Windows lock-in.