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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

As for libraries, it seems PDFKit is the dominant one.

As to why it’s so inaccessible…because Adobe created this monstrosity to do just about everything. Text, fonts, vector graphics, raster graphics, forms, color spaces, JavaScript, encryption, signatures, 3D artwork, video, audio, Flash, and probably more. It’s bonkers as to what it can possibly include, and it was developed during a way different time.

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When you put it like that, sounds like there's a log4j somewhere in there, easily.

There have been many. Acrobat CVEs were a dime a dozen in the 2010s

You can embed flash in PDF?!?

In the good old days you could embed executable code in a PDF. Interactive flash games. Java applets.

Sanity has prevailed and a lot of that just doesn’t work anymore, but IIRC Adobe wanted PDF to be “the” file interchange format.

And those weren’t even things when the PDF was first created.

Yeah, I had forgotten that when I was looking through the version history. I remembered most of those features, but when I saw Flash, I had to sit and slowly blink for a minute.

(A lot of those “interactive” features are exposed in Adobe InDesign, hence my passing, regrettable familiarity.)

We recently had a ticket from a user where an uploaded PDF wouldn't load in browser (Chrome). Turns out the PDF had embedded Flash content. I was blown away that in 2022 some application somewhere was still embedding Flash in their PDFs.

I'd count yourself lucky whatever that spooky shit was couldn't execute!

Yu can embed all multimedia types, plus internally attach files like xls, or whatever you want.

This part of the reason it's such a security nightmare.

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