Invented by Adobe Systems over 20 years ago, the Portable Document Format (PDF) is now an open standard for electronic document exchange maintained by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO). When you convert documents, forms, graphics, and web pages to PDF, they look just like they would if printed.

PDF

Multiple trailers in a PDF file

TL;DR Multiple trailers allow for Incremental Updates in PDFs. New changes (data/objects) are appended to the file end, preventing a full rewrite. Each trailer...
Mark Stephens
2 min read

How do Browsers auto reverse the Right to left…

You might have encountered a situation where you tried to read from pdf or other text input streams and writing the raw data into...
suda
1 min read

Handling Floating Point coordinates with Pixels in SVG &…

Recently I have been working on a problem with SVG & the HTML5 Canvas that causes bad looking output in some of our files....
Lyndon Armitage
1 min read

How to extract Structured text from PDF files in…

TL;DR: PDFs use complex binary/compressed data that standard text editors can’t read. To inspect the internal structure, use JPedal (for debugging content streams), RUPS...
Mark Stephens
2 min read

How are Embedded CMAP tables defined in a PDF…

Every glyf inside a PDF file can have a display value and a different extraction value. This is useful because often you need to...
Mark Stephens
2 min read

What does the ActualText dictionary tag do?

Text is defined in the PDF file format as a display value (normally what you see onscreen) and an extraction value. It is useful...
Mark Stephens
29 sec read