Technology

59708 readers

1855 users here now

This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.

Our Rules

Follow the lemmy.world rules.
Only tech related content.
Be excellent to each another!
Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
Politics threads may be removed.
No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed

Approved Bots

founded 1 year ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

263

Making a PDF that’s larger than Germany (alexwlchan.net)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

29 comments fedilink hide all child comments

Some version of this has been floating around the Internet since 2007, probably earlier. This tweet is pretty emblematic of posts about this claim: it’s stated as pure fact, with no supporting evidence or explanation. We’re meant to just accept that a single PDF can only cover about half the area of Germany, and we’re not given any reason why 381 kilometres is the magic limit.

I started wondering: has anybody made a PDF this big? How hard would it be? Can you make a PDF that’s even bigger?

A few years ago I did some silly noodling into PostScript, the precursor to PDF, and it was a lot of fun. I’ve never actually dived into the internals of PDF, and this seems like a good opportunity.

Let’s dig in.

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 48 points 10 months ago (1 children)

Clearly PDF is an outdated standard if it cannot handle files greater than 381 km x 381 km in size.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 10 months ago (1 children)

For real! How am I going to make a 1:1 map of Europe like this?!

[–] [email protected] 5 points 10 months ago

There's probably an emacs plugin for that.