World's Gone Mad

I just opened a random PDF file I got from https://pdfobject.com/pdf/sample.pdf in Firefox and it opened in a separate browser tab with the above URL. Then I right-clicked on the body of the displayed text and chose "Inspect" and it popped up with an HTML document. It looks like Firefox parses the PDF and builds a DOM object on the fly for each page which contains all the contents of the PDF objects in the file. If someone had told me they were planning to do this I would have said "forget it!" How do they handle embedded fonts? Do they convert them all to outlines and display them as SVG? I just would never expect two high-level formats like HTML and PDF to be inter-convertible. I would have thought they would have to translate to a common lower-level format, and then maybe there would be a class of documents you could quotient out which would be faithfully translatable at the higher level, but is that what they're doing, or does this work for anything?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Steven Johnson - So You Think You Know How to Take Derivatives?

Hitachi HD44780U LCD Display Fonts

Tensor Fields and Simplicial Complexes