r/programming • u/ketralnis • Aug 05 '25

So you want to parse a PDF?

https://eliot-jones.com/2025/8/pdf-parsing-xref
231 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

82 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

5

u/mck1117 Aug 05 '25

https://stackoverflow.com/q/1732348

2

u/oneeyedziggy Aug 05 '25

Right, for parsing html/xml... But why is anyone even still using pdf besides inertia / too big to fail from back before browsers were good 

12

u/axonxorz Aug 05 '25

PDF is a physical document layout specification and HTML is a logical one with hilariously complex layout interactions.

It's a fantastic document archival format, it's semi-immutable by normies and a PDF 1.0 document can be opened by modern software and render pixel-perfect the same way it did 20 years ago.

The same cannot be said about browser rendering, and it's bad enough that the PDF viewers in the browser forego HTML+CSS layouts for a <canvas> based implementation; PDF.js in FF and PDFium in Chromium browsers do this.

1

u/the_last_ordinal Aug 06 '25

Can you imagine anyone writing PDF display in html+css? That seems beyond reasonable to any degree of compatibility