this post was submitted on 04 Apr 2025
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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.
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....
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.
@Mongostein@lemmy.ca
That makes a lot of sense. Thanks!
Probably what Microsoft ripped off for the XPS printer lol.
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.
Depending on the program, there can indeed be a significant difference between exporting and ‘saving as’. For example, Excel will export as a csv in the standard format just fine, but if you ‘save as’ csv it’ll come with extra formatting symbols specific to Excel that’ll wreck attempts to use it in other programs that don’t handle for it.