Sure I've said this before, but I was once asked to embed a video in a pdf so people could print it...

Client has asked me to sign an NDA. They've emailed me the NDA and asked that I print two copies of it, one which I must sign and return to them, and the other to keep for myself. Because I'm to print it twice, they've attached two copies of the NDA in PDF form. They're identical, I've checked.

I once had a client who wanted a system where no matter what type of file someone uploaded we'd make a PDF out of it. I don't mean "print to PDF", I mean like a straight conversion. A picture, a doc file, a speadsheet, an MP3, a video, a CAD file, a .ivt file format you and I make up right now and tell no one else about for storing Iowan votes, anything.

I told him that was impossible.* There are indeed things out there where you can print to a pdf, but it would mean that a program that knows what a .grml file is, and how to represent it on paper, assuming it even can be, is involved in the middle.

He refused to believe me, and found a company where the sales person swore up and down their product could do it. I said "then you explained it wrong" and we went back and forth. It culminated in me being put in contact with THEIR programmer. I explained what he was looking for. Their programmer replied along the lines of "but that's impossible, and also what would a PDF of half these examples even look like?" I basically said "I know, but your guy is telling my guy you can do this, so you need to tell your guy to STFU before we ALL get roped into trying to convert Duke Nukem maps and zip files full of dlls to pdfs."

Luckily it finally died after that, but the whole ordeal took months.

*I'm being direct/blunt for the sake of brevity when recapping what I said, just fill in the usual "talking with a client niceties"

Public sector. Guy wants to upload a PDF file into our system that exceeds our file size upload limit by a factor of more than 10. The PDF contains a lot of pictures.

His idea: print the hundreds of pages of the PDF on paper in b/w and scan it because b/w takes less space then colored pictures.

I am perplexed. He asked first though, so we could prevent the actual printing.

Today a user printed a pdf my system produced, scanned the printed pages and mailed the scan as pdf..... To me...
I'm physically hurting from seeing it...

Client: You are bad developers. Your code has bugs and the site isn't even pretty. And why is it so damn expensive??
Us: ...

Same client (a month later): I need this campaign landing page with the option to register and an admin for user management. It should be done till the day after tomorrow because the URL is already in print. Here's the catalogue (in .pdf) in which it will appear. Use it as a style guide.

FUCK YOU!

You can kill me for this...
I've one old printer and and I wanted to print some pages. So I did following steps

1. Plugged printers power cable and turned it on.
2. Connected included cable to printer.
3. Opened PDF and tried to print
4. Did step 3 for fucking 20minutes

What went wrong?
I fucking forgot to connect USB cable to my fucking laptop. FML...

A colleague of mine from the administration department suddenly enters my room where my team and me are all busy and, without considering I'm talking with someone else, interrupts us.
he: "I needed to call you but your phone is in do-not-disturb mode"
me: "that's because I'm busy working on something urgent and I don't want to be disturbed"
he: "but I need your help!"
me: "we're working on a urgent thing, but, anyway, what's the problem"
he: "I need help with digital invoicing"
me: "I deal with programming, I don't think I can help..."
he (interrupting): "I created a digital invoice but I need to send a printable version to a customer"
me: "digital invoices should be XML files so you can't simply take the file's content and paste into Word and print..."
he: "in fact that's what I did and the result was horrible"
me: "I was saying just that. I'm sure, anyway, there should be some online tool for producing a well-formatted PDF from a digital invoice"
he doesn't say anything
me: "you can try with a search on Google..."
he: "but I'm not an IT guy, that's not my business"
me: "this has nothing to do with programming, you simply need to find a tool online for doing this"
he (disappointed): "ok, but this is computer stuff, I'll try..."

Should I print and scan the PDF to you?

Let me ask you something: why do most people prefer ms word over a simple plain text document when writing a manual. Use Markdown!

You can search and index it (grep, ack, etc)
You don't waste time formatting it.
It's portable over OS.
You only need a simple text editor.
You can export it to other formats, like PDF to print it!
You can use a version control system to version it.

Please! stop using those other formats. Make everyone's life easier.

Same applies when sharing tables. Simple CSV files are enough most of the time.

Thank you!!?!

Hi everyone, just discovered this wonderful community and I've got a new rant just for the occasion.

I work at a creative agency and we offer writing, design and web development.

This client wanted the whole package, so we've written a ton a copy, got it approved, sent it to translation, got it approved, designed both print and digital assets and developed a website.

Everything was looking good, files sent to the printer, website ready to be deployed...

Then we get a call and a PDF of text changes. The stuff is already printed.

The business owner's wife (not an employee) took it upon herself to make changes to the text, some of which have grammatical and spelling mistakes.

Everything has to be delayed, files have to be resent to the printer, project goes over budget, we're pissed, the printer is pissed and their director of communications is pissed.

What a shit show. I wonder who's going to get thrown under the bus for this one.

When you create your CV in HTML/CSS print as PDF and attach that to the job application, because word is annoying you with its lack of layout abilities.

I just wanted this bit of text over there --->
but no, I have to go make a text box, position that thing in an "absolute" way and have it still be wrong when exporting as PDF.

Really how hard is it to let me build a nice layout 😒

Our clients get links to a WebGL application which is rendering a modified 3D model and displaying some data in real time (domain irrelevant).

Today a client asked if there was a way to print that.

You know. Print "that". The 3D rendering of the model.

Printing a screenshot was not deemed sufficient, since it doesn't hold enough information. Also if you are thinking to just print a few key perspectives with the crucial information rendered in - they already get a PDF with exactly that.

What are they even looking for? A freaking hologram?..

I'm doing my CV in Vue with Bulma and everything is all nice and neat. I have a nice and neat 'skills' section that you can see pictured, and it's nice and neat. However, what is not very nice and neat is Firefox (and chrome's) print to PDF thing which ignore the nice little semi meaningless dots that I have, which is so fucking asdfghjkl;

Well I FUCKING FINALLY managed to build a program that makes my dad's printer print automatically.
Have ranted about this on my previous rant.
My recent approach was actually overengineered all over the top. I was using pyautogui to simulate the mouse that would call the settings window on Windows, which would print a nozzle test (the translation for "Düsentestmuster" according to google?). The more I worked with it, the more I would have had to care about edge cases when calling the settings and god knows what else...😖
So I left the idea.
What I came up with was a python script with some copy-pasted code of an example from the win32print api that printed an image that I specified, so it would use all inks. Somehow it works perfectly...
After that I used the win32api. ShellExecute() with ghostscript to print a PDF for the PGBK ink.
Finally a batch script to run this python script on the task scheduler. No converted .exe as dependencies and whatnot let it all go to hell.😒

It's not quite what I had originally anticipated as a solution but IT FINALLY FUCKING WORKS!!
...😪 It took way longer than expected and although I somehow couldn't manage to print all on 1 paper, I'm still satisfied that it really works.

That's all, had to vent my frustration and share this personal success.

TL;DR: Printers suck. MS-Word sucks.

Yesterday I wanted to print a few participation certificates for my blender project students.

*Turns on printer, runs downstairs, gets paper, runs upstairs, puts paper in*

So I tried to print in word. Nothing happened. Printer was online. I checked queue: Nothing.

*a couple of tries later*

Okay, fuck it! I export it as a pdf and open it in edge (8 times. 8 documents. Edge is a neat pdf-viewer, fight me). I press print on one. It works. I print the others and check: They look shit. The images look like 25% resolution and 50% jpg compression. I check word.

It by default exports in low quality. Yea, thanks for asking me. I export pdfs again and check "high quality". Open them, print. Done.

These were like 30 wasted minutes and print color. And paper.

Btw they look fucking neat. I can't show them right now but gradient text headline, project name is a rendered and edited 3D object :D

When your Program prints a PDF two times. What the Client thinks what happend:
myDocument.printTwoTimes();

When you review your Code:
This shouldn't even print once! How is any of this even working?

Happend to me today at work :D

And just when you like Linux a little too much, it bites you in the ass to remind you why the year of the Linux desktop never happened.

Wifi printer is installed, CUPS test page works, even scanning works. But printing anything else results in the printer spitting out raw postscript with a few random lines per page.

Great. Looks like I'll have to print to PDF, then go to a copy shop and print because printing under Linux is still an unsolved issue.

And yes, that would have worked even with Windows 10. Fuck.

Our smart and very professional sales guy strikes again,

I had to do some research on if I could print a pdf file directly from the server (be it php / nodejs)

When I told him I had found a solution he said, good job and went away, I was like...hmm k..

A few days later he came to my senior being mad that the project wasn't done in time.. And we were like.. Dude... What project!?

Apparently he made a deal to have a working demo in two weeks, but we (our dev team) never got that message...

Today, I made someones day in 5 minutes by using my phone camera, a picture to pdf converter, and a wireless capable printer to take a sheet of music in a small book, supersize it, and print it so they could read it without squinting.

Sometimes I forget how awesome it is to have this technology on demand, and it takes someone who doesn't have it to realize just how cool it is.

I was originally looking for a USB print and scanner server, but I ended up getting two Raspberry Pis instead. The Zero W will serve the printer (CUPS for printing and SANE for an online PDF scanning system that I'll create) and I'll use the 3B as a media server. Time to learn some Python 😄

YIL (Yesterday, I learned) that, in Austria, digital signatures on documents (using a signature you can only get by verifying your identity, which can be done in person, or online but no I'm not making pics with my passport, ever) have the same value as handwritten signatures.

If someone provides you a PDF and tells you to print it out and sign it, you can just sign it on your PC and send the PDF back, and unless they explicitly told you not to do so (it can't be put in terms and conditions), they can't reject a signature provided in this way.

"I need a way to create PDFs from word documents"
"OK, here's Cute PDF, just print to it"
"Great, how does this work with my pdf letterhead?"
"Oh, well that's different, we'll need to create a word template with the letterhead pieces from the PDF. Here you go."
"OK, how do I merge the word documents generated by my fuckmess of a CRM software system?"
"You can copy and paste it, or we can purchase this software for you that should be able to do it"
"Why didn't you install that software first? You guys are useless"

Alright buddy, fuck you too. I'll be sure to automatically assume that even though your initial email is a full, complete request, that there's more behind it and read your mind through the email going forward.

I was pretty upset at my loved one today. She asks me how to save a file into a PDF, so I explained how to print to PDF from chrome, pretty simple, good so far. Then...
-"Hey, the file has an 'e' for internet, will they need internet to open the file?"
-No, why would they?
-The file has an 'e'
-Did you name it 'e'?
-No, but it has an 'e' like internet
-... You mean the icon?
-Yes
-Right click, click on properties and change the default program to Adobe...
-Oh God, it's so complicated, I'll ask someone else to do it
-What? It's literally 2 clicks!
-Why does it need internet?
-It doesn't! It's just the default
-The what?
-Cheez! Doesnt matter, just go to properties and click on 'Change'
-Fine! Done now what?... Ooh...
-Now click on Adobe Acrobat
-Awesome! Thanks! Now it's fixed, I'm so glad because I'm about to send it on an email and I'm sure my boss would have thrown a fit if they weren't able to open it offline
-😒

At my previous job I was working with cliets as a support for our application. One client had problem printing invoice so they caled. Was web application so invoice was first converted to PDF then you would print it.
I ask client if they have Abobe Reader installed. Her response was some thing like that: " I don't know what are you saying. Its is like you are talking chines."
I asked for remote access, fix problem.

Still don't know how they managed to use application.

At the car workshop, the mechanics are trying to print some pdf from the net. It looks like the job is sent to the printer, but nothing comes out. Restart the printer: no luck. Restart the computer: no cookie. Open the pdf in chrome instead of IE: yep.

This rant can basically be boiled down to the name of the software in use/question:
FileMaker Pro 8.5

Please chime in if you have ever had the privelege of working with this gem of a database program, especially the scripting capabilities...

Trying to make it print/save/export an individual PDF file into a folder specified/created by one field with the filename set from another field. Will probably get it to work but the drag and drop scripting style reminds me of setting up an autoclicker for runescape; so fricken painful. Love to hear your comments.

Also happens to be running on an ancient PPC G5 iMac with 1 Gig of RAM running 10.4.11 hidden in the back room of an old warehouse with extra creepy flickering lights...

EFFF EMMM ELLL

So yeah thats my rainy Friday rant, hope you all are having this much fun.

I'm having to use MS Word again today, and yet again I want to punch my computer in the balls, and frankly I could pull a better piece of software out of a pig's arse.

So there is a feature that automatically adds up the figures in a column to give you a total. Useful, right?

No. Because the total doesn't update automatically. There is even a setting somewhere to have it update before save, and when you turn this setting on, it sometimes updates before save depending on what mood it's in.

You can have it reliably update before you "print to pdf", but not before you "save as pdf".

Fine, there's probably another setting buried somewhere that actually works, but why the fuck is it not turned on by default? What kind of moron wants an automatic total that doesn't update automatically?

I first encountered this feature about 20 years ago, and in all that time none of the thousands of developers at MS has thought "this is shit, let's fix it."

But that's what a developer does, surely. They look at things and say "this is shit, let's fix it".

If you've been looking at something that's so obviously shit, and so easily fixed, for 20 years and not had any urge to fix it, you're not a developer, you're a cretin.

The stupidity cries out from the earth for vengeance.

I sent a recruiter my CV as a PDF file. They replied that they need it as a Word document. They must be joking, right? I always use my website's reader view to generate an updated CV by saving it as a PDF which contains text and images in accessible format. So it can't be hard to convert to Word?

I just installed Microsoft Edge on Linux, because I heard that Edge can save websites as Word documents. It can't. At least not on Linux, using the print or the save as dialog.

I don't even know what to tag this rant. Those people must be making fun of me. What are they supposed to do with a fucking Microsoft Word document? Make sure that the layout gets broken and the content truncated when forwarding it internally?

I hate my printer...
All day I was creating my CV, and I was creating it in Word from MS Office, in .docx extension...
I exported it to .pdf, it added margins, okay, I just need to live with it...
After that, I clicked `print` button in Word, so I wondered that will look the same as it was on preview before printing....but it wasn't...it looks horrible, even if I choose the black-white option, and all my work fucked up 'cuz stupid printer doesn't want to help me, fuck you my printer, I'll buy better one soon...

I called the hack "blow up bunny", was in my first company.

We had 4 industrial printers which usually got fed by PHP / IPP to generate invoices / picking lists / ...

The dilemma started with inventory - we didn't have time to prepar due to a severe influenza going round (my team of 5 was down to 2 persons, where on was stuck with trying to maintain order. Overall I guess more than 40 % ill, of roughly 70 persons...)

Inventory was the kind of ultimate death process. Since the company sold mobile accessoires and other - small - stuff.

Small is the important word here....

Over 10 000 items were usually in stock.

Everything needed to be counted if open or (if closed) at least registered.

The dev task was to generate PDFs with SKUs and prefilled information to prevent disaster.

The problem wasn't printing.

The problem was time and size.

To generate lists for > 10 000 articles, matching SKUs, segmented by number of teams isn't fun.

To print it even less. Especially since printers can and will fail - if you send nonstop, there is a high chance that the printer get's stuck since the printers command buffer get's cranky and so on.

It was my longest working day: 18 hours.

In the end "Blow up bunny" did something incredibly stupid: It was a not so trivial bash pipeline which "blew up" the large PDF in a max of 5 pages, sent it to one of the 4 printers in round robin fashion.

After a max of 4 iterations, bunny was called.

"bunny" was the fun part.

Via IPP you can of course watch the printer queue.

So...

Check if queue was empty, start next round with determined empty printer queues.

Not so easy already. But due to the amount of pages this could fail too.

This was the moment where my brain suddenly got stuck aft 4 o clock in the morning in a very dark and spookey empty company - what if the printer get's stuck? I could send an reset queue or stuff like that, but all in all - dead is dead. Paper Jam is paper jam.

So... I just added all cups servers to the curl list of bunny.

Yes. I printed on all > 50 printers on 4 beefy CUPS servers in the whole company.

It worked.

People were pretty pissed since collecting them was a pita... But it worked.

And in less than 2 hours, which I would have never believed (cannot remember the previous time or number of pages...)

!advert
To all indian ranters, print your pdf programming literature using printster.in or from there mobile app, prices are really cheap.

How I get screenshots in an email from the guy I work with.

First, get a screenshot of the issue. Next, print it. Then, upload the printed screenshot as a PDF. Finally, compose email and attach the uploaded PDF.

Why in the FUCK does the NSLSC (company that lends out student loans) have as their ONLY method to update your banking information a .pdf that you print out online and physically mail in. Once they receive it–will take another 1-2 weeks (according to them) to update my banking information.

It's fucking 2019, every single service I've used to update any kind of information (from gym payments to government related information) can be done online through a secure, streamlined, fast, environmentally friendly and cost effective ONLINE FORM.

Most illogical thing I had to do today.

Today i received an email from bank to fill an attached form to receive payment from a foreign country.

Face palm no 1: The form they sent was in doc format. The layout of the form was all fucked up.

So I downloaded a proper PDF version of the same form from the bank's website.

I filled the form on my computer and signed it using my pen tablet and emailed it back.

Few hours later somone from bank calls me.

Facepalm no 2: He sounded frantic. He asked me to physically mail the "orginal" of the form!

He was thinking I took the printout of the form, filled it by hand and send the scanned copy.

I told him I filled everything digitally so there is no "original" form in physical sense.

Also since I emailed him the form, it doesn't make any sense at all, for me to take the printout of the digital version and mail it to him when he could just open his email and take a print out.

He didn't seem to grasp that idea at all.

Finally, I agreed to go to a branch nearby me and got him speak to an employee there over my phone and they said they will courier the printout to him.

I don't know if the people there are dumb or I am too smart.

So after 5 days of trying to figure out why the fuck nemID (danish online id) is a piece of shit and doesn't want to show the pdfs I'm sending, so that they can be fucking signed, I've finally found a way to produce pdfs that it doesn't choke the fuck out on.
Just fucking open the fucking pdf in fucking Acrobat and fucking print it to a fucking pdf using fucking Microdick print to pdf... TWICE! WTAF?
So guess what I'll be creating an API for today...

Also fucking give me a proper error code when your shit doesn't work! Why the fuck are you sending me an error code stating that the checksum doesn't match, when 1) I didn't fucking send you one in the first place and 2) it doesn't work because you fucks didn't implement the entire fucking pdf spec! So when my fucking pdf contains some fucking pdf-element that you decided was to hard to implement a web view for, tell me that!

Any source code or program to print
selected portion sections of a pdf file on a web page? For example you only wana print some part on a PDF file.... Any nerd out here to help?

New forum post! "Here are some useful links:"
- useful link
- semi-useful link
- link to some random URL, hosting a PDF of the print view of a Wikipedia article, from 2007(???)

Finally done implementing this fuck shit API...

As pr my last rant, I had to implement an API that prints a document twice using "Microsoft Print to PDF"... Turns out that's a shit task, who would have thunk 😑
This is one big ass Calvinball game and I'm not a fan, but if that's the shit you have to do, then I guess I'll try to make it resilient...

got a client who wants me to "stream pdf files instead of serving them so users cant download or print them".

as far as I know this is impossible. but he replied we dont care if an IT guy figured out a way to get it but we want majority of normal people to be unable to figure a way around it.

if im gonna need to show ms word and pdf files i will need an iframe or object embed and i cant disable right clicks or listen on ctrl s / p.

any ideas or should i not go for the project :(

(how) is it possible to run a shell command from a websites javascript? i am aware of the well known security issue but have a use case where i can assume it less critical. currently using ie11 activex which is fine but not supported on other browsers and hell i want not to be dependent on ie! tried to find it myself of course but without success.
in detail i want to print several pdf files with one click based on a javascript array using plain vanilla js.
am i missing something or am i out of luck?

"The employee handbook has gone paperless starting this year to help the environment! Please print out the acknowledgement form and deliver to HR that you acknowledge receiving the enclosed PDF of the handbook."

So here's my question. To print PDF's is better doing via Backend or Frontend? I've been testing and for me, both have some pros and cons, but I want to listen to u guys.