A True Adobe Acrobat

Porting Doom to bizarre platforms has become a popular internet pastime. From Lego bricks to pregnancy tests, the legendary FPS keeps finding unique homes. Recently, a high school student creatively named DoomPDF has ported the game into a PDF file. The marvel is the brainchild of GitHub user ading2210, who describes themselves as a ‘high school student with an interest in programming, web development, and cybersecurity’.

Translation of the quote: high school student with an interest in programming, web development, and cybersecurity

How it Works

Ading2210 reveals that the PDF file format allows for Javascript, enabling the unprecedented porting of Doom. Although the specs suggest it should be feasible, they note the limited implementation across browsers, especially on Chromium.

Facilitating keyboard inputs was straightforward, but ensuring smoother gameplay within the PDF turned out to be a significant challenge:

“Previous interactive PDF projects I’ve seen use individual text fields that are toggled on/off to make individual pixels. However, Doom’s resolution is 320x200 which would mean thousands of text fields would have to be toggled every frame, which is infeasible. Instead, this port uses a separate text field for each row in the screen, then it sets their contents to various ASCII characters. I managed to get a 6 color monochrome output this way, which is enough for things to be legible in-game.”
— Ading2210

The creation can be experienced here, but it comes with a caveat: the gameplay is clunky and hitting targets is a dubious venture.

Interestingly, this isn’t the first instance of Doom’s unconventional adaptation. A few years prior, game developer Sam Chiet had managed to port Doom into Notepad, yielding a smoother experience than its PDF counterpart. With the trend showing no signs of slowing, one can only wonder how long it will be until someone ports Doom into Microsoft Word.