Developing with PDF: Dive Into the Portable Document Format

by Leonard Rosenthol

PDF is becoming the standard for digital documents worldwide, but it's not easy to learn on your own. With capabilities that let you use a variety of images and text, embed audio and video, and provide links and navigation, there's a lot to explore. This practical guide helps you understand how to work with PDF to construct your own documents, troubleshoot problems, and even build your own tools.You'll also find best practices for producing, manipulating, and consuming PDF documents. In addition, this highly approachable reference will help you navigate the official (and complex) ISO documentation.Learn how to combine PDF objects into a cohesive wholeUse PDF's imaging model to create vector and raster graphicsIntegrate text, and become familiar with fonts and glyphsProvide navigation within and between documentsUse annotations to overlay or incorporate additional contentBuild interactive forms with the Widget annotationEmbed related files such as multimedia, 3D content, and XML filesUse optional content to enable non-printing graphicsTag content with HTML-like structures, including paragraphs and tables

Genres: Programming

218 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 2013

Reviews

[Brad Bedson · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a great book to read. Especially since I did not read it yet. I am trying to link to the url of the photo of this book and for some reason it seems that I do not own it. This is just test mumbo jumbo for the purposes of building a book review web site.

[Patrick · Rating 3 out of 5]

As a Support Engineer for two Adobe PDF libraries, I'm fairly familiar with this material already but I did learn some new things as well. In some respects, this book acts as an introduction to the PDF specification, giving you enough background and some useful tips to orient yourself within that voluminous work. That said, there are some weak points. This edition does not cover embedded fonts, which is a necessity for conformance to variants like PDF/A (and PDF/X apparently) as well for dealing with Non-Latin text. and where the PDF spec is weak on explaining the ins and out of how structured content is supposed to work, this is also a bit weak. In contrast, I thought that the PDF spec was stronger in describing how 3D annotations work because I had previously implemented an interface for this stuff where each dictionary described in a table in the spec basically got its own class. Having the dictionary entries explained without those tables made things more confusing than need be.

All that said, if you are looking to immerse yourself in the world of PDF, this book is a good entry point.

[Alan]

http://www.drdobbs.com/tools/develope...

Rosenthol's new book is certainly the best available guide to PDF features, document structure, and the history that underlies them. Rosenthol is an Adobe employee who specializes in representing the company at PDF-standards meetings. He has long been a presence on PDF mailing lists and forums, answering questions about the document and explaining esoteric details.