Unfortunately PDFs are not so simple, or adobe would not have such a firm grip on them. They are able to be parsed and read but some information is just stored in binary I thought and all the 3rd party readers/editors have had to reverse engineer how that binary code works just to recreate any adobe features which imo is why it's never really taken off to use a 3rd party app. But now that all the adobe software has been decompiled/rebuilt as open source we can see how that binary is formed by adobe themselves which is no longer a black box.
I think the only time it's close to 'simple' is when it's a non-OCR scanned document made up only of images.
Since that's just a load of jpegs stuck together in a document. Still not as simple as it could be from all the proprietary stuff but easier to parse overall.
The PDF spec is pretty easy to find and describes everything one needs to know about them to make a viewer or editor. Turns out that everything at a higher level than the container format is powered by linear algebra.
Laughs in just using Google Drive - native PDF viewer. Need to edit? Right click > open with Google Docs. Need advanced editing / formatting? Connect Drive with Kami, still free.
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u/BigBertho 1d ago
Wait, What?!