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Comment by bandrami

7 months ago

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

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bandrami

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layer8  7 months ago

PostScript is deprecated in PDF though.

  • hi-v-rocknroll  7 months ago

    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.