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Comment by antics

5 days ago

One of my formative experiences as a freshman in CS (I learned to program in college) was accidentally opening a PDF with Emacs and watching as it displayed not weird binary data but a real, rendered PDF. I wondered what else it was doing behind my back that I didn't know about.

Sadly, I was not able to run Doom in a PDF, in Emacs. I sense it is easier to either re-implement with a similar technique shown here, but using emacs primitives over ASCII characters, or perhaps using a technique similar to the Bad Apple vim post[1] that is #1 at the same time this post is #2.

[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42674116

I accidentally opened a pdf with less a few weeks ago and learned about pdftotext and all the other software that pagers can use to display arbitrary documents if set up correctly.

Reminded me of how modern linux distros decide how to execute a file. When I learned about that years ago, I spent far too long getting .exe files to run in either wine or mono when run on my machine. Fun exercise, not worth it.