Comment by thekingofravens

5 months ago

PDF handling came to mind as absolutely horrible experience. If you want to make a pdf, the choices were either: 1. Very low level, getting into the nitty gritty implementation details of PDF. 2. Very High level, only suitable to make the equivalent of a word document with very little control of layout 3. Typst, which is nice externally but honestly very difficult to use as a library. 4. mupdf over C FFI can get you mid-level pdf generation. Mid level as in you control layout but aren't using an editor to inspect the generated raw instructions in a PDF. Then you have unsafe everywhere or time spent with FFI making basic wrapper/abstraction negates the benefits.

Oh and for the first 3 the relevant docs for using it in this way are out of date and you will need to look at source code.