A Peek at What is Inside
I said that PostScript, Adobe’s page description language, became one of the foundations of the portable document format. That’s true, as far as it goes; however PDF files don’t contain actual PostScript code. Instead, PDF files contain instructions for drawing pages that are PostScript-like instructions, but simplified and designed for efficient processing. These PostScript-like instructions manipulate the objects that are displayed on the page, which roughly fall into three types:
Graphic path objects: These objects contain information about the lines, rectangles, and curves on a page, and how they are to be placed, drawn, and filled.
PDF image objects: You can also think of these as raster images—a stream of pixels, in ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access