Portable Document Format

A proprietary format owned by Adobe until 2008, when it was released and relicensed as an ISO standard.

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

Free software tools that work with PDF

• pdftk
• poppler
• Scribus
• Imagemagick

Cookbook

apt-get install poppler-utils

pdftocairo -png mydoc.pdf

Creates a series of PNG files.

Python tools to manipulate / generate PDF

• flat
• reportlab
• pyPDF2

Examples

An example using reportlab (see http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2252726/how-to-create-pdf-files-in-python)

from reportlab.pdfgen import canvas
from reportlab.lib.units import inch, cm
c = canvas.Canvas('ex.pdf')
c.drawImage('ar.jpg', 0, 0, 10*cm, 10*cm)
c.showPage()
c.save()