• @[email protected]
    link
    fedilink
    5
    edit-2
    27 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.

    • @[email protected]
      link
      fedilink
      English
      227 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…

      • @[email protected]
        link
        fedilink
        127 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]

      • Redex
        link
        fedilink
        127 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.

        • @[email protected]
          link
          fedilink
          127 days ago

          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.