[PDF Explained] [Author: John Whitington] [December, 2011]

by John Whitington

At last, here’s an approachable introduction to the widely used Portable Document Format. PDFs are everywhere, both online and in printed form, but few people take advantage of the useful features or grasp the nuances of this format. This concise book provides a hands-on tour of the world’s leading page-description language for programmers, power users, and professionals in the search, electronic publishing, and printing industries. Illustrated with lots of examples, this book is the documentation you need to fully understand PDF.

Genres: Programming

Paperback

First published November 30, 2011

About the author

John Whitington founded a company which builds software for electronic document processing. He studied, and taught, Computer Science at Queens’ College, Cambridge. His books include the textbooks PDF Explained (O'Reilly, 2012), OCaml from the Very Beginning (Coherent, 2013), and Haskell from the Very Beginning (Coherent, 2019) and the Popular Science book A Machine Made this Book: Ten Sketches of Computer Science (Coherent, 2016).

Reviews

[Flávio Sousa]

Succinct and intuitive on the inner workings of pdfs.

[Alex Ott]

Pretty good & short introduction into PDF format internal details. This book could be used as start point before reading PDF Reference

[Rembo666]

Good, concise introduction. Sure beats reading the whole spec.