On Mon, Mar 24, 2025 at 14:59:04 -0500, G. Branden Robinson wrote: > > One can't read or edit PDF. (I do both.) > > You mean with a text editor? Conceded. Partially. I think it's > in a compressed form by default, but you can turn that off and get > more human-readable output. > > A quick experiment: > > $ echo 'Hello, world.' | groff -T pdf -P -d > > reveals a PostScript-like language, with unfortunate occasional recourse > to non-printable characters.
The ps-like page description language inside page streams is not the problem. The structure of the pdf file that relies on file offsets is. See the startxref at the end of the file, xref table at the specified offset, and the list of offsets to pdf objects that follows. -uwe
