• Mongostein@lemmy.ca
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    19 days ago

    It’s a joke. PDF is a document format that you need to “export” rather than save in most word processing applications. I’m not sure why.

    • Veneroso@lemmy.world
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      18 days ago

      Okay yeah that makes more sense.

      “Save As” by a different name I guess.

      Except maybe it was because it’s not an editable format by the application? That was always silly… Why Adobe has a near monopoly on editing PDFs.

      But the real tarrifs would be on importing them…

      • Redex@lemmy.world
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        18 days ago

        Yeah I think in general “export” is used for cases where you’re saving to an application’s non-native file type, whilst save as is more often for “save as a new file somewhere else”, tho I’ve seen a lot of apps allow you to use “save as” to save to a uneditable format.

      • phneutral@feddit.org
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        18 days ago

        The reason for PDF „export“ is it’s origin. PDF in its early days had to be “printed” or “distilled” in a separate application because the process behind the format is the same as sending your file to be printed on a printer. This step changes the (editable) human readable file into (locked) printer readable code in the form of “post script”. PDF is in short nothing but a container that wraps around a bunch of post script code and makes it human readable again.

        @[email protected]

        • Veneroso@lemmy.world
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          18 days ago

          That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!

          Probably what Microsoft ripped off for the XPS printer lol.