PDF Explained: The ISO Standard for Document Exchange

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.

Build a simple PDF file from scratch in a text editor Learn the layout and content of a PDF file, as well as the syntax of its objectsExamine the logical structure of PDF objects, and learn how pages and their resources are arranged into a documentCreate vector graphics and raster images in PDF, and deal with transparency, color spaces, and patternsExplore PDF operators for building and showing text stringsGet up to speed on bookmarks, metadata, hyperlinks, annotations, and file attachmentsLearn how encryption and document permissions work in PDFUse the pdftk program to process PDF files from the command line

Genres: Programming

181 pages, Kindle Edition

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.