Developing with PDF

Preface

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the way in which most documents are produced for distribution, collaboration, and archiving worldwide. It has been standardized by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) and by governments in over 75 countries as their format of choice for their documentation. The printing industry has required the use of PDF for any professional printing job. With billions of publicly available documents and an untold number of documents living in private repositories, no other file format has the wide reach and ubiquity that PDF does.

However, even with those billions of documents in circulation, the PDF format remains poorly understood by users and developers alike due to there being a dearth of documentation beyond ISO 32000-1, the PDF standard itself. And while the standard is an excellent technical document, its size, complexity, and dry style make it unapproachable for many.

The goal of this book is to provide an approachable reference to PDF. It covers key topics from the standard in a way that will enable the technically minded to understand what is inside a PDF. For those simply needing to examine the internals of a PDF to diagnose problems, you will find the tools you need here, and those who want to construct their own valid and well-formed documents will find out how to do so.

Who Should Read This Book

While this book goes into some fairly deep technical topics, I’ve tried to present them in such a way that any technically ...