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Acrobat 7’s maximum PDF size limit (381 km²) overlaid on Germany (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 4 weeks ago (2 children)

Some questions...

How is this measured in sq km, rather than something digital such as pixels?
Why is it 381? How did they arrive at that number?
Why is there any limit at all, if it's this big?

[–] [email protected] 48 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

Beginning with PDF 1.6, the size of the default user space unit may be set with the UserUnit entry of the page dictionary. Acrobat 7.0 supports a maximum UserUnit value of 75,000, which gives a maximum page dimension of 15,000,000 inches (14,400 * 75,000 * 1 ⁄ 72). The minimum UserUnit value is 1.0 (the default).

15 million inches happens to be exactly 381 km Source

[–] [email protected] 16 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

That's sooooo arbitrary.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 4 weeks ago

True. But thankfully most of the world uses centimetrs instead of inches nowadays. 😉

[–] [email protected] 30 points 4 weeks ago* (last edited 4 weeks ago) (1 children)

To satisfy the anything but metric postulate: 381 km originally are 15 million inches.

However, using some tricks, the size isn't limited to that.

https://alexwlchan.net/2024/big-pdf/

Remark: The side length of the square correspods to 381 km, subsequently, its area is 145161 km^2 .
381 km^2 are slightly smaller than the city of Cologne.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 weeks ago (1 children)

Good to see Germany won't run out of PDF for their digital mapping efforts and need a costly replacement.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 weeks ago

I'm pretty sure, we would use a costly alternative anyways.