Thanks for this. Really quells the urge I get every so often to just code my own PDF editor, because they all suck and certainly it couldn't be THAT hard. Such hubris!
Should take... a weekend tops? ;) PDF is crazy and scary
Wait, this is more complete than SOAP. It may be a good idea to redo the IPC protocol with a different serialization format!
Society would probably never recover if we started implementing RPC-in-Postscript though.
Not kidding - it's a ~~~billion dollar market haha
Make an MVP/Show HN :-)
As far as I understand it, at its core, pdf is just a stream of instructions that is continually modifying the document. You can insert a thousand objects before you start the next word in a paragraph. And this is just the most basic stuff. Anything on a page can be anywhere in the stream. I don't know if you can go back and edit previous pages, you might have a shot at least trying to understand one page at a time.
Did you know you can have embedded XML in PDFs? You can have a paper form with all the data filled in and include an XML version of that for any computer systems that would like an easier way to read it.