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Well you can run JavaScript inside a PDF, so technically it is Turing complete.

From ~30s of searching, it looks like that's an Adobe Reader feature: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/9219807/using-javascript...

My original comment was going to be "Who thought that was a good idea? Maybe there are reasons, but that sounds like a terrible idea at face value".

I've seen some forms made with PDFs with js in them. A painful experience for sure.

Chrome's builtin PDF reader supports it. You can even find a PDF that uses JS to play a game of pong in Chrome.

Well, out of all the places that makes sense, it's Chrome after all.

Either way, it sounds like a pretty bad idea to add this as a feature to Adobe Reader or somehow to the PDF spec. Especially since PDF remote code execution exploits happen relatively often.

That would be PostScript, of which PDF is pretty much the "compiled bytecode" version. I consider its abandonment a big loss for the industry.

We could've gone PS++, but now we've got SGML++--++^&^!!1!!

PDF viewers have lots of remote code execution vulnerabilities, so it is de facto Turing complete.