December 9, 2019

PDF internals

How hard can it be?

In 2008, Adobe published a specification which is PDF 1.7 (which is ISO 32000). This document is 756 pages. Subsequent to this, with new versions of Acrobat and other software, Adobe has published "extensions", which are provided for in the original document.

Start at the "General" section of the IDR blog. From the IDR blog: "At the end of the day, if it opens in Acrobat it is accepted as a PDF and you need to handle it."

Ruby language PDF code

Projects in other languages

The qpdf package is recommended as a command line tool to get a basic look at a PDF file. PDFedit includes a Qt based GUI.
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Tom's Computer Info / [email protected]