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Comment by jonathaneunice

7 months ago

I never imagined a future in which PDFs talked back. Now I can.

PostScript is Turing complete and your PDF reader is a PostScript interpreter. So, yeah, potentially any PDF is instructions to a general-purpose computer.

  • PostScript is deprecated in PDF though.

    • Older versions of PDF files and readers don't know or care about what happened later. PDFs also did shady shit like being able to embed JavaScript actions and other files. They also became Turing complete when they adopted Type 4 functions in PDF 1.3 that still aren't deprecated in 2.0.

      LaTeX subsumed most of the human authoring uses of PS where it was used in academia.

PostScript files are dynamic code. You can create polygons dynamically with commands. And, of course, font FX's, styles, elipses...

Also, there's a ZMachine interpreter (text adventure player) written in PostScript which can play Zork and some libre games such as Calypso with just GhostScript, the PostScript interpreter most software use to render PostScript files.