On Sun, 7/19/2026 7:27 AM, knuttle wrote:

On 07/18/2026 9:17 PM, Mr. Man-wai Chang wrote:

On 7/19/2026 8:50 AM, J. P. Gilliver wrote:

[]
Failing that, print - from Acrobat or other PDF viewer, or Edge or
Firefox - one page at a time. Don't mess with double-sided - if
absolutely necessary to have double-sided, print the odd pages, one at a >>> time, then you can feed the paper back into the printer to get even
pages printed on the other sides.

PDFs are just EBSDIC also text (.txt) files
that requires a special pair of glasses
called "PDF Viewer" to see its hidden
print preview. :)

All files, data, tokens.... are strings
of 8-bit characters. Streams as called
by Unix.

ASCII-EBCDIC
<http://natural-innovations.com/computing/asciiebcdic.html>

Not exactly.ÿ There is a text based PDF and the other is an image.

Keith, don't forget to trim the newsgroup list.
In particular, don't crosspost into comp.lang.c , as
that group is about programming in the C language
and isn't a "spew" group.

*******

PDF supports multimedia, including embedded video,
and the embedded video rectangle, I don't know
what happens when that is printed exactly.

Multimedia objects are encoded, like they might
use ASCII85 for parts of it. Fonts are encoded.
Fonts are injected as a subset (only the letters
needing definition, are in the table). This is part
of the reason that some tools, when you go to edit
the text in a PDF, the tool cannot prepare a representation
of a letter which is not in the font table. In early generations
of PDF, entire font tables were included. They don't do that
any more.

PDF can be in a "mostly binary" form (if you throw the file
into Notepad, it "looks binary" for most normal PDF files),
or it can be rendered in a more ASCII like form. It is the ASCII form
that allows a human to read the structure, see the list of
objects in it and so on. You can save out the following example,
and load it into your PDF reader. In this example, it relies
on Helvetica being in the engine that reads the document (some
printers, the engine in the printer can print a PDF natively,
the printer being able to read a PDF).

https://www.adobe.com/technology/pdfs/presentations/KingPDFTutorial.pdf

*************** hello-king.pdf **************************

%PDF-1.2
1 0 obj
<<
/Type /Page
/Parent 5 0 R
/Resources 3 0 R
/Contents 2 0 R

endobj
2 0 obj
<<
/Length 51

stream
BT
/F1 24 Tf
1 0 0 1 260 254 Tm
(Hello World)Tj
ET
endstream
endobj
3 0 obj
<<
/ProcSet[/PDF/Text]
/Font <</F1 4 0 R >>

endobj
4 0 obj
<<
/Type /Font
/Subtype /Type1
/Name /F1
/BaseFont/Helvetica

endobj
5 0 obj
<<
/Type /Pages
/Kids [ 1 0 R ]
/Count 1
/MediaBox
[ 0 0 612 446 ]

endobj
6 0 obj
<<
/Type /Catalog
/Pages 5 0 R

endobj
trailer
<<
/Root 6 0 R

*************** END: hello-king.pdf *********************

The lowest form of PDF, consists of an image per page,
and is what your scanner produces when you tell the scanning
software that this is a multi-page document. The JPG scans
can just be suitably encoded as one image after another, into
the PDF.

Then, it takes OCR, and placing PDF text into the document,
on top of the image, to make a "searchable" PDF, as now it
has text that can be searched. Otherwise, a scanner PDF is
mostly useless, and only suited to being printed on your
laser printer.

Paul


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