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Comment by Xelbair | Hacker News Reader

if you print PDF file to PDF it creates a copy of a file.

Doesn't seem to.

    david@desktop:~/test$ ls -hl
    total 8.9M
    -rw-r--r--. 1 david david 2.2M Jun 10 06:02 chromium.pdf
    -rw-r--r--. 1 david david 4.4M Jun 10 06:02 firefox.pdf
    -rw-r--r--. 1 david david 2.3M Jun 10 06:01 input.pdf
    david@desktop:~/test$

On Firefox if you print you can choose "safe to pdf" then it has a different checksum (compared to the downloaded one), if you say "print using the system dialog" then "print to file" the checksum is again different (compared to the other two).

Linux with Firefox 126

Most likely it uses different libraries for PDF print, like the browser one is different than the system one.

It annoys me how you have to manually choose these safe options in FF. Same with "copy link" vs "copy link without site tracking." Why would anybody ever want the former?

People doing marketing, I guess.

Site tracking might end up being needed if a site changes how their URLs work in response, breaking sites. Facebook made a change a while back where they went from fb.com/<unique readable url>+<tracking slug> to fb.com/<link UUID> after the tracking details were getting stripped out.

For sure not true. I get PDF invoices, from one of my contractors, that my bookkeeping software chokes on.

I use print to PDF to generate a version that it can handle.

(That does not say anything about whether it removes metadata though, just that it’s not the same file)

On all OS's? That seems like a nice optimization, but I doubt it is true everywhere. There's always someone who never optimizes anything.

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