This page contains information and references for PDF Programming – Standard Informaton, Document Structure and Programming Frameworks (mainly for C#).
Standards Information
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format developed by Adobe in the 1990s to present documents. It is based on the PostScript language, and was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.
The Adobe's PDF Reference and Adobe Extensions to the PDF Specification site contains a copy fo the ISO 32000-1 Standard document.
Development Libraries and Frameworks
These are some Libraries and Frameworks for PDF creation, processing, display, etc., for different programming languages.
- PDFsharp is an Open Source .NET library for PDF creation and processing.
- iText is an Open Source library for creating and manipulating PDF files in Java and .NET. NOT gratis.†
- Haru (libHaru) is a free and open source library for generating PDF files. Written in C, compiles to DLL.†
† These libraries have NOT been tested by Pepe.
Following are some PDF manipulation tools:
- PDFtk is a cross-platform tool for manipulating PDFs. There is a free version.†
- QPDF is a free command-line PDF transformer, linearizer and merger/splitter. It is NOT a PDF generator.†
† These tools have NOT been tested by Pepe.
Links
Various interesting links for the PDF file format:
- Understanding the PDF File Format in the IDR Solutions page.
Page last modified March 17, 2022.
