With the help of Apple’s preview, Alex Chan created a 37-year-old PDF wide. It all started on a napkin.
Probably never thought of this, but how big a portable document format (PDF)?
The closest to a response we had until recently is official, from the Adobe PDF, and is surprising: 40% of Germany size. We are talking about a PDF page with 381 kilometers sides and an area of over 145,000 square kilometers. 15 million inches.
But a United Reio software programmer will have surpassed this madness and created a PDF file so great that challenges everything we can find to know about the subject: its PDF file is greater than the observable universe.
It all started on a napkin
As the PDFs remembers were born from Adobe’s co -founder’s view, John Warnock, in the early 1990s, to create a universal document format.
After noticing the limitations of the postcipt, Warnock started the “Camelot Project”which was initially scribbled on a napkin and eventually led to the launch of the first PDFs and Adobe Acrobat in 1993. Very quickly, PDFs became a useful and easy way to preserve formatting on all devices and operating systems.
But the format was not considered legitimate until 1996, when US Internal Revenue Service adopted the PDFs for fiscal documentation. And only in 2008 did the PDF become open to the world and used by practically everyone. In fact, it currently reigns as one of the most ominous document formats worldwide-it is estimated that about 98% of companies trust the format, according to the.
And everyone (or almost everyone) uses the basic A4, but Alex Chan – as well as the preview application of Apple, often used to edit photo sizes – have no limits.
With MacBooks preview, the programmer introduced a page width of a user units triliary, which, when converted, resulted in a square page with almost 352 778 kilometers wide – equivalent to the distance from Earth to the moon. But it didn’t stop there.
Chan went further and ended up creating a PDF with dimensions of 37 bilions of light years wide -Far beyond the estimated diameter of 93 billion light years of the observable universe.
Although the file is mostly blank space, it is confirmed: it is the greatest empty space-and, to be sincere, “the universe is also,” joked the programmer.
“Please don’t try to print it,” he wrote in the file to download the file he made available on his blog.
Big Think compares the story to the tale of Jorge Luis Borges On Exactitude in Sciencein which cartographers create such a detailed map that it becomes as large as the empire it represents.
