4
vicary
5y

Why would the origin point in the PDF coordinate system is at the bottom left of the page? Why?

Comments
  • 1
    This must not be the case.

    Ii's not defined in the PDF Standard but mostly a choice of the library.

    For the reason why: Why not? XD
  • 9
    The bottom left is the natural origin of any coordinate system. The question is why the coordinates system from a computer has it’s origin in the top left.
  • 7
    @Sumafu I believe that has its origin in the starting point of the beam scan cycle for old CRT monitors.
  • 1
    @Sumafu Probably because developer worked on it and not a mathematician!
    For PDF, I use Scryber lib in C# and don’t remember name in Java (FoP maybe ?). Both don’t need coordinates and are closer to HTML/CSS.
    Wrote my own mini lib for excel generation with “flow” close to html.
  • 1
    @monkeyboy
    @sumafu
    @NoToJavascript

    https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

    Has less to do with mathematics, more practical reasons....

    You read from left to right, top to bottom - so top left corner is the origin point.

    Most APIs I know (OpenGL, PDF, Images ...) instead do the "right" aka "mathematical" approach and use the bottom left corner as in the quadrant 1 of an coordinate system.
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