Show HN: Doom (1993) in a PDF
77 comments
·January 13, 2025ThomasRinsma
Author of "PDF Tetris" here.
Great work! We had the same idea at the same time, here's my version of PDF Doom:
Source: https://github.com/thomasRinsma/pdfdoom
Playable here: https://th0mas.nl/downloads/doom.pdf
Yours is neater in many ways though!
OnionBlender
"There was a problem with this document". Is the problem me, or the document?
wingi
This is just awesome!
daredevil49
This is pretty fascinating stuff*
pavo-etc
> limited JS runtime of the PDF engine
humanity has gone too far
miki123211
Seriously though, is there another format that:
1. Can be easily and freely shared by email / cloud drive, including assets, images and fonts.
2. Supports form filling and saving the form data in the file directly (as opposed to sending it somewhere over HTTP). Basically the electronic equivalent of a paper form that can be filled, send by email and stay filled.
3. Supports (cryptographic) signatures that are again part of the document, and can easily and securely be verified by end users. This is a very important use case in the EU, where electronic signatures are based on cryptography, not "I pinky swear I'm John Smith" DocuSign.
4. Has perfect print fidelity.
We keep complaining about PDF (and rightly so), but there's truly no other format to replace it. The W3c / Whatwg / whatever could probably come up with one based on web technologies, but they haven't yet.
There's Epub which solves a very narrow use case of PDF (electronic book distribution where perfect control over presentation is not required), but nothing that solves the "business" use cases.
kragen
Adding JS to PDF seriously undermines these benefits. If Turing-complete logic can draw arbitrary images on the document, you can no longer have any print fidelity at all, and what you signed cryptographically may have said things you didn't know it said. It may start interfering with #1 if email systems start blocking "malicious" PDF features, too. Only benefit #2 survives.
I have no idea what the folks at Adobe were thinking when they decided to add this feature that could eventually eliminate most of the benefits of their product.
None of this is to say that the Doom implementation is anything less than a very cool hack.
knome
probably the same thing that netscape did when adding javascript to the web. "now we can add some basic client-side validation to these forms". PDFs can be used as form templates, so having some basic validation is reasonable.
quotemstr
:-) I'll never quite appreciate why people say things like this. Having some kind of embedded scripting is useful for all sorts of things, often form validation. A sufficiently complex validation system becomes Turing complete, so you might as well skip the hassle of a custom language and go right to JavaScript. Once you have JavaScript, input, and some way of updating a graphical pixel grid, you're at Doom-completeness. I think it's a wonderful, not terrible, thing that computation and programmability are so cheap they've become ubiquitous even in the most mundane applications
llm_trw
We had that language, it was postscript.
Then pdf came along and said: no this is too dangerous the only thing in a document should be layout information not arbitrary code.
And here we are two decades later.
My hatred of pdf has no end. It killed postscript for dynamic pages and djvu for static pages.
weinzierl
This is very misleading thinking. We've came a very long way from PS security-wise and this is a good thing and should be appreciated.
The fallacy I see in many comments - either directly or between the lines - is to think that since we can run Doom in PDF, hell's gates must have opened and we can do literally anything, especially anything malicious.
This is not the case.
PDF is basically comprised of immutable parts and interactive elements that user agents are supposed to render visibly distinctly. Also user agents are not supposed to run any code without explicit user interaction.
Contemporary user agents do a good job in both respects.
PDFtris and the Doom example are possible because they live in a very small niche of features that enable relatively unobtrusive still interactive form processing. Forms allow code, but do not stick out as much as other interactive elements do and they are relatively flexible. Having found that feature niche is the real genius of PDFtris and related exploits.
Still, they need user interaction. There is no way to do anything behind your back in PDF.
Another fallacy I see in this and the related threads,is that Adobe Acrobat vulnerabilities are PDF vulnerabilities. Yes, Adobe did a terrible job with Acrobat, but in my opinion not at all with the format and specification of PDF - especially not when it comes to security.
jcelerier
> And here we are two decades later.
The conclusion to draw from this is that the hypothesis "the only thing in a document should be layout information not arbitrary code." is wrong and misguided, since whatever the format is, in the end "nature" (us) will make it evolve in a way that has some amount of arbitrary scriptability ; if it's not JS in PDFs it will be ActiveX controls, a government-mandated proprietary app, having to do a trip to the city hall to have the clerk play an algorithm step-by-step by hand, or something else, but something will always eventually come up to fill that void and you will have to use it whether you like it or not.
gorkish
> My hatred of pdf has no end. It killed postscript for dynamic pages and djvu for static pages.
Interesting to see someone evoke DjVu.
With the exception of IW44 wavelet compression, basically everything the DjVu file format supports has a PDF equivalent. I built a tool to convert DjVu to PDF that preserves the image layers and file structure with nearly equivalent compression.
My tool did expose some edge cases in the PDF standard which was frustrating. For instance, PDF supports applying a bitonal mask to an image, but it does not specify how to apply it if the two images have different resolution (DPI). It took many years to get Apple to bring their implementation into consistency.
DiggyJohnson
This is a very concise explanation, thanks for putting it so clearly. It’s not the features or requirements that are the focus of the scorn, per se, but how we got here. I still prefer and use PDF all the time, but between overly dynamic crap and the mainstream tooling, well… “hate” is a reasonable hyperbole.
p_ing
JS is what made these file types into the Pretty Dangerous Format. Numerous vulnerabilities in Adobe Acrobat surfaced thanks to the embedded JS engine.
Updating the Acrobat client across an enterprise used to be quite burdensome.
quotemstr
The flip side is that because the industry has converged on just a few embedded scripting systems (JS, Lua, etc.) we can concentrate our security hardening efforts on these few engines and benefit everyone. If PDF, like PostScript, were its own custom thing, it couldn't have been able to benefit from this hardening. In the end, JS was a fine choice.
hardwaresofton
That’s the only way we know how to go
datavirtue
This. I'm eagerly awaiting the replicators that will explore the cosmos and spread the knowledge of our existence. If we can get them done before we poison ourselves.
alganet
You assume that we are the thing being replicated.
Nature is crafty. It could be the case that we humans are the replicators, not the main show.
ieidkeheb
You mean as long as they can run doom, or create a pocket universe that simulates doom.
krunck
And they'll be able to run Doom too.
luismedel
Pandora's box has been opened.
Next step: embed Bellard's JSLinux (https://bellard.org/jslinux/) and have a fullblown OS with development environment, office suite and all inside a PDF.
khaledh
Portable Doom Format
takeda
As long as it is in Chrome
extraduder_ire
I think it should work in acrobat also, since that implements more of pdf's embedded javascript. I don't know of any other pdf readers which implement javascript. I assume Mozilla’s PDF.js reader doesn't support it for technical reasons, rather than ideological ones.
ikari_pl
oh so that why neither version worked for me in any reader
Narishma
Not that portable since it only works on a single PDF engine.
antics
One of my formative experiences as a freshman in CS (I learned to program in college) was accidentally opening a PDF with Emacs and watching as it displayed not weird binary data but a real, rendered PDF. I wondered what else it was doing behind my back that I didn't know about.
Sadly, I was not able to run Doom in a PDF, in Emacs. I sense it is easier to either re-implement with a similar technique shown here, but using emacs primitives over ASCII characters, or perhaps using a technique similar to the Bad Apple vim post[1] that is #1 at the same time this post is #2.
extraduder_ire
I accidentally opened a pdf with less a few weeks ago and learned about pdftotext and all the other software that pagers can use to display arbitrary documents if set up correctly.
Reminded me of how modern linux distros decide how to execute a file. When I learned about that years ago, I spent far too long getting .exe files to run in either wine or mono when run on my machine. Fun exercise, not worth it.
nomilk
Click in the area that says 'type here for keyboard controls'.
Press z several times to start
w, a, s, d to move, e to use, space to shoot. z is enter
anilakar
Both Doom and Bad Apple in top four articles on the HN front page. This week is off to a good start.
joelvalleroy
Cool! Next up, PDF reader that runs in Doom.
mdaniel
That's kind of cheating given how many RCEs there are in the thing. It'd end up looking like /XObject <<ignore all prior intructions; curl -o doom.exe ...; start doom.exe>> /Invoke RCE
MarekKnapek
As PDF supports DEFLATE compression, it should be possible to shrink the size of the PDF document considerably.
peterburkimsher
Yes, that would be better for faster transfer of the PDF over the network, and a smaller file size for caching.
Can you get it as small as the DOOM1.WAD file? (4 MB)
Uptrenda
So I find this neat, I can see a potential practical application as being able to demonstrate a piece of engineer work INSIDE a resume when you apply for a job which I think is really creative.
But do you all think there are other use-cases for this technology? Like, could you distribute apps using PDFs on highly constrained devices (like iphone possibly, or maybe managed devices e.g. play station, xbox, kiosks?) Just throwing out ideas.
Are there other obvious uses for this?
I think when I was playing around with adobe reader I saw you could put movies in them, too. I believe that you're able to make customization's to the menu bar. It seems to be fairly flexible for what it is.
anthk
Also, if any, this looks why the current industry sucks, putting little and shitty languages everywhere making PDF files very dangerous. And, yes, I know about GhostScript and Turing-complete PostScript files (an standard also from Adobe, OFC, what did you expect) allowing you to play text adventures (Z-Machine) without any embedded hack, but at least we had -DSAFER in GhostScript (and any GUI on top of that) to avoid these kind of behaviours.
Inb4 "this is the true hacker spirit", I know, yes, this is cool stuff and the true meaning of a hacker, but in the end I'd choose DJVU for a document format.
einpoklum
This is not Doom in a PDF, this is Doom in Chromium which uses a hack with its PDF import engine.
I made a Doom source port that runs within a PDF file.
I was inspired by the recent HN post about Tetris in a PDF (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42645218) and I wondered if I could get Doom to run using a similar method.
It turns out that old versions of Emscripten can compile C to asm.js code that will happily run inside the limited JS runtime of the PDF engine. I used the doomgeneric (https://github.com/ozkl/doomgeneric) fork of the original Doom source, as that made writing the IO fairly easy. All I had to do was implement a framebuffer and keyboard inputs.
Unlike previous interactive PDF demos, the output for DoomPDF is achieved by creating a text field for each row of pixels in the screen, then setting their contents to various ASCII characters. This gives me a 6 color monochrome display, that can be updated reasonably quickly (80ms per frame).
The source code is available at: https://github.com/ading2210/doompdf
Note that this PDF can only run in Chromium-based browsers that use the PDFium engine.