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.

Canvas based (GUI)

• Scribus https://www.scribus.net/
• Inkscape http://inkscape.org/
• Laidout https://laidout.org/

Web based (web-to-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/
• 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