every PDF file launches a virtual machine.

I hope not :)

@ScriptCoded it somewhat does haha.
Every time you open a PDF, it spins up a Postscript Virtual Machine, that is interpreting all postscript and can itself even spin up stuff like a JS Virtual Machine among other stuff. I think nowadays it's even capable of rendering 3D shit.

It's obviously not an actual virtual machine with an OS and shit, but more of a Sandbox environment of sorts, but it definitely has some Features, that an OS would also have.

Interpreters aren't as big a deal as people make them out to be. The line between a decompression algorithm and a Turing machine is vanishingly thin.

@thebiochemic yeah I guess when you put it like that it makes sense 😅 Java vm for example

A virtual printer machine which prints the document on the screen.