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

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

imposition tools (multiple)

F/LOSS tools to make PDFs

Thanks to the Ghostscript project, there are many free software tools that work with postscript and PDF. The list below is transcluded from the Layout Tools page.

Canvas based (GUI)

• Scribus https://www.scribus.net/
• Inkscape http://inkscape.org/
• Laidout https://laidout.org/
• Electric Zine Maker https://alienmelon.itch.io/electric-zine-maker

CSS Print based (CSS Print)

• your browser (based on CSS Paged Media): use CTRL+P/CMD+P
• Weasyprint https://weasyprint.readthedocs.io/
• Paged.js https://www.pagedjs.org/
• wkhtmltopdf https://wkhtmltopdf.org/
• OSPKit (CSS Regions legacy support!) http://osp.kitchen/tools/ospkit/

P5.js based

• genzine https://github.com/munusshih/p5.genzine by Munus Shih and Iley Cao

Python based

• rinohtype http://www.mos6581.org/rinohtype/master/
• ReportLab https://www.reportlab.com/
• Flat http://xxyxyz.org/flat/
• PyX https://pyx-project.org/ (outputs to PostScript, PDF and SVG)

TeX based

• TeX https://tug.org/ + https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX
• LaTeX https://www.latex-project.org/
• ConTeXt https://wiki.contextgarden.net/
• texinfo https://www.gnu.org/software/texinfo/manual/texinfo/html_node/Short-Sample-Texinfo-File.html
• tectonic https://tectonic-typesetting.github.io/
• lyx https://www.lyx.org/

XML based

• speedata https://showcase.speedata.de/en/

Misc

• groff https://www.gnu.org/software/groff/
• SILE https://sile-typesetter.org/ (LaTeX-like)
• typst https://typst.app/ (custom markdown syntax)
• SATySFi https://github.com/gfngfn/SATySFi (LaTeX-like + OCaml-like)
• Patoline https://patoline.github.io/ (wiki/LaTeX/Ocaml-like)

Examples

Pandoc

$ pandoc -f markdown --pdf-engine weasyprint -c stylesheet.css filename.md -o filename.pdf

Weasyprint

$ weasyprint -s stylesheet.css filename.html filename.pdf

ReportLab

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()

See also

• Imposition tools, to rearrange PDFs
• Typesetting Tools
• Category:PagedMedia
• Web-to-print