
… They Didn’t Stop to Think if They Should
Welcome to 2025, the year DOOM was recreated inside of a PDF. DoomPDF exists thanks to the horrifying fact that Javascript can run, with its own separate standard library, inside of PDFs. This, of course, makes the supposed static document tool even more dangerous than you likely thought. The ridiculous inclusion does mean you can head to Github to host your own DoomPDF or play online at doom.pdf.
DoomPDF is brought to you by horrifying-pdf-experiments and pdftris, who describe how they managed to port the 320×200 game to a PDF. Instead of filling entire pages with ASCII they did it in lines, 25 stacked text fields render something rather DOOM-like. It’s slow and has some collision errors, but there is no doubt that it is now the most horrific PDF file to date. When you try it, make sure use a Chromium browser, click into the field that suggests you enter commands in it to interface witht the game, and use the Enter button on the PDF, not on your keyboard.
The Reg ran the PDF in a Chromium browser and, purely in the interest of research, spent perhaps more time than we should making sure the monochrome rendering of '90s mayhem worked as we remembered.
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