Python Programming On Win32

Portable Document Format

PDF is a recent evolution of PostScript. Whereas PostScript was intended to be consumed by printers, PDF is designed for both online viewing and printing. It allows for features such as clickable links, clickable tables of contents, and sounds. It is intended as a final form for documents. You could possibly edit PDF if you had a few months to spare, but it isn’t easy. It also remedies some basic problems with PostScript. (PostScript contains arbitrary subroutines that might generate pages in a loop or subject to conditions; so the only way to look at page 499 of a 500-page document, or even to know that there are 500 pages, is to execute the code and render it all.)

For the average developer, PDF is compelling because the Acrobat Reader is freely and widely available on almost all platforms. This means you can produce a document that can be emailed, stored on the Web, downloaded, and printed at leisure by your users, on almost any platform. Furthermore, all they get is the document, not any attached spreadsheets or data they shouldn’t, and you can be confident it won’t be tampered with. For this reason, many companies are looking at PDF as a format for much of their documentation.

PDF documents are generally created in two ways, both of which involve buying Adobe Acrobat. This includes PDFWriter, a printer driver that lets you print any document to a PDF file; and Distiller, which turns PostScript files into PDF files. These are excellent tools that fulfill ...