gwern comments on Help us Optimize the Contents of the Sequences eBook - Less Wrong

11 Post author: lukeprog 19 September 2013 04:31AM

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Comment author: gwern 19 September 2013 06:03:49PM 0 points [-]

You can embed arbitrary javascript in PDFs

This doesn't seem usefully true. Some googling for search queries like 'a/b testing PDFs' or 'PDF phone home' show no one discussing the topic of A/B testing different versions of PDFs, and Wikipedia indicates that only Adobe supports JS and even it produces a popup when you try to phonehome. So any A/B test is going to work on only a fraction of users (how many LWers still use Adobe Acrobat to read PDFs?), and it will alarm the ones it does work on ('is this PDF spyware‽').

Comment author: LM7805 19 September 2013 06:48:10PM 0 points [-]

Foxit Reader supports javascript, and libpoppler (which powers evince and okular, among others) does as well.

Without something to measure, though, that's really just a technical curiosity.