PDF notes

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PDF is a file format to store published versions of documents.

It is mot often seen for manuals, articles (alongside PostScript), and such.

From a functional point of view, the PDF language combines

• layout and graphics in much in the same way as PostScript does (which is why the two are fairly directly and accurately convertible), though PDF is not a full language as PS is.
• Font embedding in documents
• Other file embedding

Graphical advantages over Postscript include transparency, embedded raster images

But like Postscript, it is a rendering format more than it is a document format.

Versions

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The internal format versions often went with major Acrobat releases.

• PDF 1.0 with Acrobat 1.0 (1993)

• PDF 1.1 with Acrobat 2.0 (1996)
  • Introduced links, some color features, passwords

• PDF 1.2 with Acrobat 3.0 (1996)
  • Introduced Unicode, some interactivity, media, some more color and image features

• PDF 1.3 with Acrobat 4.0 (2000)
  • Introduced digital signatures, some color features, JavaScript actions

• PDF 1.4 with Acrobat 5.0 (2001)
  • introduced transparency, JBIG2 images, OCR text layers

• PDF 1.5 with Acrobat 6.0 (2003)
  • some more stream features, JPEG2000 raster

• PDF 1.6 with Acrobat 7.0 (2004)
  • Inroduced option of OpenType fonts
  • XML forms
  • AES encryption
  • Embedded multimedia

• PDF 1.7 with Acrobat 8.0 (2006)

Since here, PDF specs were handed over to ISO. This means Adobe no longer releases PDF specs, but publishes extensions that initially only their products support, but which it tries to get into the ISO standard.

• PDF 1.7 plus Adobe Extension Level 3 with Acrobat 9.0 (2008)

• PDF 2.0 (2017), ISO 32000-2

Most viewers support all 1.4 features, and not necessarily all features since that time. (verify)

From a quick and likely-skewed sampling of PDF files, it seems that typical versions lag a decade behind what's available - which is probably great for compatibility. And is partly intentional, as saving PDFs for backwards compatibility often went a few versions/years back.

PDF/A

For long-term preservation of documents it is a good idea to restrict a PDF to a subset of features to ensure that

it can be fully rendered anywhere, e.g.

requiring font information be embedded rather than linked

require a lack of encryption

disallow audio, video

it does not use any more recent features that are potentially exploitable

disallow scripting, executable launching

PDF/A-1 (2005) is a specification based on PDF (1.4) of such a set of restrictions.

It refers to ISO 19005-1:2005, "Document Management - Electronic document file format for long term preservation - Part 1: Use of PDF 1.4 (PDF/A-1)"

PDF/A-1a and PDF/A-1b refer to a specific levels of compliance.

PDF/A-2 (2011) considers features from 1.5, 1.6 and 1.7 and decided to include JPEG 2000, OpenType fonts, transparency effects and layers, digital signatures

PDF/A-3 (2012) allows embedding of arbitrary files

PDF/A-4 is expected in 2019, and based on PDF 2.0

See also:

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF/A

PDF Viewers

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• Adobe Reader
• Foxit Reader
• Sumatra PDF
• PDF-XChange Viewer

• Preview (OSX)
• Skim (OSX)

• gv
• Xpdf ()
• ePDFView
• Poppler
• Okular (KDE4)
• KPDF (KDE)
• Evince (GNOME)

• MuPDF

• BePDF (BeOS)

• Yap
• Vindaloo

Editing, annotating, tools

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• Adobe Acrobat Pro (paid)
• PDFEdit (free)
• Foxit Editor

• flpsed (annotates)

• Pdfvue

ps2pdf12, ps2pdf13, and ps2pdf14 actually call ps2pdfwr with a specific version argument, and ps2pdfwr mostly just calls gs (GhostScript)

Mostly page-based operations:

• pdftk
  • merge, split, rotate, watermark, metadata, attachment, encrypt, decrypt, attempt to uncorrupt

• pdfjam has a few convenience utilities (mostly for printing) such as pdfnup (many-on-a-page), pdfjoin (combines separate documents/pages) and pdf90 (rotate 90 degrees)

• pdfshuffler
  • (split, rearrange, merge, rotate, crop)

• PDFGarden (OSX)
  • split, combine, arrange, and such

GIMP, Inkscape and such can also open PDF pages, but they tend not to be very convenient.

Converters, Printing to PDF

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• many online converters

• http://www.dopdf.com/

• http://convert.neevia.com/

Print to PDF:

• PDF Creator
• CutePDF
• FinePrint

Note that most office suites can save to PDF.

Libraries

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• MuPDF
• Ghostsript (interprets PS and PDF)

Generating from code, analysing from code

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Note: There are a bunch of converters from HTML, which may be a convenient intermediate for simple documents.

• pdflib
  • free + paid versions
  • C, has bindings for C++, Java, Perl, PHP, Python, Ruby, Tcl

• binding to Cairo

Python:

• reportlab
  • pdfgen (low-level)
  • Platypus (higher-level)

• pycairo

• pyPdf

• pisa (conversion from HTML, based on reportlab)

• rst2pdf (reStructuredText to PDF)

• pdfminer (text analyser)

Things that output to PDF that are somewhat more specific-purpose (but sometimes quite controllable):

• Various reporting systems
  • Jasper ()
  • BIRT (Java, free, part of eclipse(verify))
  • G2 Report Engine (Java, free)
  • Pentaho

Technical notes

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Sizes

MediaBox - size of the media

CropBox - box that is expected to be shown or printed

usually a li

BleedBox -

TrimBox

ArtBox -

Broadly, this is about professional printing, and cutting. Very roughly:

Mediabox should be the size of the media we're printing on,

Cropbox, BleedBox and TrimBox are about the area you end up

it seems that TrimBox is most used when printing many copies / pages onto a single sheet (see terms like press sheet)

...and it may just be the same as CropBox

Text in PDFs

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See also

• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PDF_software
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF
• PostScript notes