this post was submitted on 11 May 2026
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me_irl
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Published. Document. Format.
I thought it was Perverted Document Format.
I think I heard ol' Don say he invented it and it's called the presidential document format
The P stands for Portable
Also, and a lot of people get this wrong, but the P is silent
Only when sitting, not standing.
Doh, you're right. My bad.
Unironically, the most incompetent and technically annoying file format to work with.
Annoying to edit, yeah, but it's a pretty good format for making sure no information on the page moves around.
My hypothesis is that Adobe Acrobat is so bad that people have started hating pdf.
That's like 80% of it, as well as stuff that really doesn't need to be a PDF but someone decided it should be un-editable so the thing you needed from it actually doesn't work.
As someone who has had to work with PDFs from a technical perspective, PDF is hot mess of a file format. The fact it works at all is as much a testament to mankind's arrogance and stubborness as the city of Phoenix existing.
I work with pdfs as a designer and they've been pretty trustworthy, but I am now burdened with the knowledge that they are a mess behind the scenes.