[tambourine_man]

PDF is also a lot less powerful, purposefully so. You can start an infinite loop just by double-clicking a PS file, for instance.

It is extremely useful to have a full programing language as a file format, though.

I miss macOS’s Preview.app auto-converting PS to PDF when double-clicked. It was a way to easily distribute a document that could randomize question orders each time it opened, print multiple bingo cards from a single file, etc.

The stack-based and reverse Polish notation thing was also fun.

[eru]

You could have made a deliberately restricted subset of PS without going all binary.

Btw, doesn't PDF include Javascript these days? So you can still randomise stuff at view-time in a PDF. See https://th0mas.nl/2025/01/12/tetris-in-a-pdf/