Portable Document Format

A proprietary format launched in 1992, owned by Adobe until 2008, after which it was released and relicensed as an ISO standard.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format

Readings

• https://www.vice.com/en/article/pam43n/why-the-pdf-is-secretly-the-worlds-most-important-file-format
• https://planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/warnock_camelot.pdf

PDF & Postscript

• Computer History Museum documented the history of postscript

PDF manipulating/editing tools

pdftk (the PDF toolkit)

pdfimages (part of poppler-utils)

pdfunite (part of poppler-utils)

pdftotext (part of poppler-utils)

$ pdftotext filename.pdf
$ pdftotext -layout filename.pdf (Maintain (as best as possible) the original physical layout of the text.)

pdfinfo (part of poppler-utils)

$ pdfinfo filename.pdf
$ pdfinfo -meta filename.pdf (print metadata)
$ pdfinfo -url filename.pdf (print all urls)
$ pdfinfo -dests filename.pdf (print all internal links)

pdffonts (part of poppler-utils)

rgb2cmyk.sh (using Ghostscript), part of OSP's pdfutils

coloseperation.sh (using Ghostscript), part of OSP's pdfutils

resize.sh (using Ghostscript), via OSP

[1] (web GUI for pdf signing, editing, combining, compression)

imposition tools (multiple)

See also

• Imposition tools, to rearrange PDFs
• Typesetting Tools
• CSS Print
• Category:PagedMedia
• Category:FLOSS design