Yeah but it's pretty limited and personally I could never get it to work, it couldn't handle larger files. Had to pirate some other program to do anything serious.

Have you ever tried to look under the hood and interact with a pdf programmatically? I assure you it only gets worse.

A while ago I tried to write a small script to scrape data out of some account statements that my idiot bank only made available in pdf format. As far as I could tell, the file was just a list of tiny chunks of text along with sets of x/y coordinates specifying where each one should be placed on the page. Answering seemingly simple questions like "are these two words on the same line?" Involved comparing raw y-coordinates because the file had no concept of a "line of text", and even spaces between words were often simulated by bumping the x-coordinate over by a few pixels instead of using an actual space character.

I suspect those files were generated by a particularly bad piece of software, and a more competent one could probably do much better, but knowing that its even possible to create a file that cursed is still infuriating to me.

Also, the entire web stack, the entire history of email, Javascript - the horrors of the universe just happen

I hate how it deals with lines in chart grids where it looks like different lines are bolded depending on your zoom level

Gimp is really bad with exporting large PDFs. Like 60 pages and it crashed my 16gb ram laptop because it ran out of memory after like spending at least an hour.