“Now he’s completely lost it” is probably what a regular reader might think. After all, I use plain text (Markdown) as the “single source of truth”1 in my document workflow,2 and now I want proper charts for visualization. Not ASCII bars. Actual pie charts. The kind managers and decision-makers expect. That sounds like a fundamental contradiction. I would argue it is not. In fact, I solved it in a clean way. Read more

Over the past few days, I once again disappeared down the proverbial rabbit hole. But let’s start from the beginning. On Saturday, I wrote a blog post to outline an automated and deterministic document workflow.1 To make it easier to follow, I also set up a Codeberg repository.2 The feedback was unexpectedly overwhelming and raised many valid points. The repository itself had been put together quickly rather than thoroughly, so I ended up revising it significantly and renaming it in the process. It is no longer just a demo. It now represents a complete, highly flexible, and at the same time very simple document workflow. Read more

A new publication written by me has been published in today’s c’t 3/2026.1 It shows step-by-step how data from PDF forms can be automatically extracted using the open source tool pdfcpu and subsequently imported back into ERP or ticket systems using jq or curl. Completely without media breaks, proprietary software or subscriptions. By the way, the editable PDF forms are created with LibreOffice. The proprietary Microsoft Office still cannot create PDF forms by 2026. Read more

The Portable Document Format (PDF)1 is a great example of how an originally brilliant concept for displaying print documents has been ruined over decades. Initially conceived as successor to PostScript,2 it has degenerated into a universal container format. Text, images, vectors, scripts, fonts, form data, even complete 3D models there’s hardly anything, that can’t end up in a PDF, including Doom.3 The PDF Pseudo-Standard In practice this means: Hardly any two PDFs are alike. A single piece of information can be packaged in a dozen different ways, depending on which program was used to create it.4 And we haven’t even gotten to the topic of signatures yet.5 Read more