@bertieb If you're too wide open, you're consuming too much junk. To be clear, excreting in the loo is also “absolutely something that computer enthusiasts and power users do”.

Though PDF can be hypothetically related with overwhelming computer enthusiasm (which is not a technical concept anyway, so the site scope is somewhat bogus here) and power users aka users with elevated privileges or system administrators, in general and in this specific instance, it is NOT related.

@AlMa1r specious reasoning, of which I suspect you are aware

if you really think there's no good reason to discuss PDFs on a technical computing QA site that's... fine, you're entitled to your views

but since I find that perspective either bewilderingly bizarre or severely lacking in imagination, I doubt either of us will convince the other

@AlMa1r but the point is: if you think "super user" in the site's name is a strict definition of its topic, you are taking something too literally to the point of being plain wrong

ditto 'enthusiasm', and 'power users'; you are using definitions that are different of to however many thousands of users

@bertieb Your reasoning from before is at least a specious. If you consider PDFs as characteristic for the so-called “computer enthusiasts”, whoever they might be, and power users, that's … fine, you're entitled to your views, too.

@bertieb Whoever has overabundant imagination in technical matters, should do something else or see a psychologist. Technical and engineering matters are, as you might suspect, are quite opposite of anything creative and humanstic. (Just in case you follow the abundance of inspirational talks praising imagination and creativity: in intentionally simplified terms, if you're asked to be creative when computing 1+1, you are being directly fooled.)

@AlMa1r lol okay, if you think using a lavatory is equivalent to PDFs when it comes to tech, sure

I don't know even where to begin to explain how they aren't the same

@bertieb You clearly failed to see the point. Go on and use your own imagination, since you're apparently so much proud of it.

Oh no, I saw your point, I just think it's hilariously misjudged

so you're irked there's people asking about them on this site

but you have misunderstood what this site is about

so your conclusions are flawed

and I would encourage you to reflect on why that might be

and similarly, why you (might) think other people need to seek psychological help, and seem to abhor creativity

(the latter being particularly contradictory as fields like computing science have plenty of people who have devised especially creative solutions to problems)

Your thinking is flawed. Go on and tell us how, in your bizarre views, a site called superuser.com should be on authoring information in the PDFs. Bear in mind, whether using your creativity or not, that creating and authoring PDFs is what, e.g., the novel writers and their publishers do all the time, and most of them are probably NOT into computers.

As for computer science, there's nothing creative there. You misunderstand the term. The folks whom you might think of as “creative” in computer science are, in fact, simply well-trained and saw an abundance of good solutions to good problems. They are able to use the existing knowledge of the humanity. This is as far from creativity as it can possibly be. Really on the other end. These folks are industrious and technically good, but by no means creative.

Happily. Trivially: say you have a load of PDFs from technical journals, ACM, etc. You want to organise them, search them somehow. But the filename doesn't contain the information you want to marshal- perhaps somewhere like the metadata might be convenient to work with...

@AlMa1r I suspect you are using a different version of 'creative' than I am

so we are going to get differing results, much as if we plug different values of x into an equation

@bertieb What you wrote on PDFs has nothing to do with super users. There's nothing super in them. That's not even in the same ballpark. There's a lot of dull, everyday routine in the publishers who handle the PDFs. Which is jolly good for everyone. And this has nothing super or extraordianary of the computer/computing world. In fact, the publishers don't perform any single computation while authoring the PDFs; they don't even compute trivial stuff as 1+1. What they do is enter string data.

oh lol, you think computers are strictly for computation?

@AlMa1r also- you didn't ask about users, super or not; you asked how PDF authoring info would be on superuser.com

if you are a real person, and not a bot or a troll, I wish you luck with your interpretations of other common terms

that is not to accuse you of either, just that this exchange is getting into Poe's law territory here for me

@bertieb “Lol” is off-topic; there' nothing funny here. As for the publishers, they stupidly enter string data. That's all; a computer is just an advanced typing machine for them. There's nothing bad about such a usage of computers as long as it serves some purpose, and at the same time, there's no way you would call it extraordinary or super. By the way, if you fail to see “super” in superuser.com, you really need to relax and take a rest before branding users as bots or trolls.

I dunno man, you talk like Oakbot

albeit significantly slower

I'm nonplussed by your obsession with publishers (and that they are doing something "stupidly"); I've no idea why entry of string data is so important to you, nor why it is somehow less valuable than "trivial stuff", like using a computer to compute 1+1; I'm not sure why you seem to think that someone who has a differing view on the meaning of a site title has failed to see a word- I've seen it, I just disagree with your narrow interpretation

but like I say, I think our viewpoints are irreconcilable, so I am content to pat ways here with my genuine wishes for the best of luck :)