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Comment on Ask HN: Why are PDFs so hard to edit?parent

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I see, so its like a lower level format than say a word doc or markdown

I wouldn's say that: it's really a "drawing" format for paged documents, and not a text format.

There is a concept of accessible PDFs, where care is taken during generation to make it as semantic as possible for screen readers etc. Editing those is usually much simpler.

The fact that text-editing tools are a common source for PDFs would mean that those text-editing tools are really where you should edit the source and regenerate.

It's like asking why are compiled binaries or minified JS so hard to edit?

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