Hacker News Reader

Network effect. Most documents are PDF. You would need at least backward compatibility, which would mean opening doors to the existing problem.

Got it. So if I want to hack anything, check if it can open PDF files first.

You may have even more luck if your input gets injected into a prompt that gets executed by an agent having internet access.

Re security, there are many pdf viewers, so the rewrites exist, and some of them do not have the js execution engine and all that jazz that opens up all sorts of potential exploits.

Because the dangerous parts are not the multimedia and interactive parts. These parts are rarely used. Even if you remove these parts from your PDF reader it’s not a meaningful security improvement. Almost all exploits are in the boring 2D text/graphics/images parts.

Microsoft tried with (Open)XPS and failed