Actually, the larges pdf that ~~can be~~ has yet been created is approximately 37 trillion light years square.
this post was submitted on 10 Jan 2026
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Cool post! Also, they never explicitly say that's the largest possible. It's just the largest they ended up at.
True.
The article says that's the limit acrobat imposes.
Yes, it's the limit Acrobat imposes or uses, but in the preview it's unlimited:
I could keep going. And I did. Eventually I ended up with a PDF that Preview claimed is larger than the entire universe – approximately 37 trillion light years square.
PDFs were a mistake we should have never let Adobe make for us
PDFs can run doom.
Its quite scary what they can do... I kinda wished they'd appended to the file type extension (like the Office team did back in 2007) for the various recent standard revisions. But that's purely my opinion, not really a defendable standpoint from practical perspective, etc.
Fuck adobe. I'm sure there's an open source alternative I can use to work on my 1:1 scale map of Europe.
Thank fuck. Can you imagine what would happen if they hadn't limited its size?
There are massive CAD files of entire cities and I imagine even states out there. You may want to print to PDF lol.
Interesting - that could be 2^30 pt, a possible clue to the technical origins of this anecdotal limitation.
The boss: “Yeah, can you print that for me to review?”