[tor-talk] pdf with tor

[Niels Elgaard Larsen]

On 13-07-2015 01:03, Yuri wrote:
> On 07/12/2015 12:27, Niels Elgaard Larsen wrote:
>> If you convert it to a safer format
> 
> It is nothing inherently unsafe in pdf format itself, and any other
> document formats aren't any safer.

PDF is an extremely complex format, the specification is more than 5000
pages. Most of it is seldom used and does not work in many readers (all
kinds of video and other multimedia, XML Forms, Rich Media, Flash, etc).

But if you are being targeted, it is likely that you receive
PDF-documents full of weird stuff. And do you know how you PDF reader
will handle that?

It probably would be possible to make a reasonable safe PDF-viewer that
could be used to read simple text. But I do not know of any.

For example pdf2text is itself very simple, but it uses poppler, which
is a big project.


> You probably confuse pdf and
> PostScript, which is more like a programming language. PDF isn't nearly
> as much a programming language as ps is. It does have interpreted
> elements in it, but so do all other formats.
> 
> Yuri

-- 
Niels Elgaard Larsen