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by ashleyn 2720 days ago
Adobe formats are notorious for bloat and scope creep. Implementing a conformant PDF reader would require you to implement a full 3D engine.
1 comments

And implement Flash.

But that's hardly unique to Adobe. Any document format that allows (arbitrary) other things to be embedded is subject to that. A Word document with other things embedded in it is no different. (Just like correctly rendering or editing an OpenDocument file would require you to implement half of SVG and MathML – while they're open specifications it doesn't necessarily mean you have an implementation at hand you can use.)