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

Signature PDF (web GUI for pdf signing, editing, combining, compression)

imposition tools (multiple)

See also

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