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Show HN: Why Two Identical PDFs Have Different SHA-256 Hashes (How We Fixed It)

docs.pdfcanon.com
1 points·by napzoom·2 months ago·4 comments

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napzoom
·2 months ago·discuss
[dead]
napzoom
·2 months ago·discuss
That's exactly the point - from the spec's perspective they aren't identical, but from every user's perspective they are. Same pages, same text, same rendering. The interesting question is whose definition of "identical" should govern when you're building audit trails or deduplication systems.
napzoom
·2 months ago·discuss
I'm the author. The post covers the seven sources of non-determinism in the spec. The one that surprised me most in practice: about half the tools I tested regenerate the /ID array on every save, even when the spec says it should be stable. Happy to dig into any of the pipeline stages or the qpdf invocation sequence if useful.