1. Forum
  2. USENET
  3. comp.editors

  • Re: What other tasks do you do that you need free PDF editing tools to do?

    From Anthk GM@anthk@disroot.org to comp.text.pdf,comp.editors,alt.comp.freeware on Sat May 23 08:20:47 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.editors

    On 2025-08-31, JJ <jj4public@outlook.com> wrote:
    On Sun, 31 Aug 2025 08:51:43 -0300, Shadow wrote:
    On Sun, 31 Aug 2025 06:40:17 -0000 (UTC), Andrew Smallshaw
    <andrews@sdf.org> wrote:

    On 2025-08-28, Marion <marion@facts.com> wrote:
    What other tasks do you do that you need free PDF editing tools to do?

    Play Doom.

    https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/14/doom_delivered_in_a_pdf/

    Now that is scary. Probably deliberately so. Never use a PDF
    viewer that allows javascript....
    []'s

    It's disturbing. Only a wacko would have come up with such misusing idea. It's a slippery slope which, with a little nudge, can easily fall into the dark side and do real damage.

    His older "brother" format from the same company, PostScript, already
    was turing complete; you could do anything from GhostScript,
    even play ZMachine text adventure games as someone built
    an interpreter made in PostScript. You can play Zork I-III
    (and more games like Tristam Island, or Calypso.z3) with 'zmachine.ps'.

    gs zmachine.ps -- your_game.z3

    Also, chess:

    https://seriot.ch/software/pschess.html

    Usage:

    gs -DNOSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile="%d.pdf" pschess_compact.ps
    --- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2
  • From Lawrence =?iso-8859-13?q?D=FFOliveiro?=@ldo@nz.invalid to comp.text.pdf,comp.editors on Sat May 23 09:33:59 2026
    From Newsgroup: comp.editors

    On Sat, 23 May 2026 08:20:47 -0000 (UTC), Anthk GM wrote:

    His older "brother" format from the same company, PostScript,
    already was turing complete; you could do anything from GhostScript,
    even play ZMachine text adventure games as someone built an
    interpreter made in PostScript.

    PDF obviously originated as a way to repurpose the graphics model
    while chucking away the programming-language part.

    The graphics model was never good for anything other than putting
    marks on paper -- certainly not interactive on-screen graphics (as
    they tried to do with Display PostScript).
    --- Synchronet 3.22a-Linux NewsLink 1.2