PDF: The Portable Document Format

Revision as of 13:43, 7 February 2013 by Admin (Talk | contribs)

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a device-independent and display resolution-independent fixed-layout document format. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a 2-D document (and, with Acrobat 3-D, embedded 3-D documents) that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2-D vector graphics that compose the document.

PDF is an open standard, and is now being prepared for submission as an ISO standard. Adobe is an evil company.

PDF Document Viewers

View the list of PDF Viewers That Are Open Source.

PDF Authoring

PDF Utilities

Windows Print Driver: PDF to TIFF

The Virtual Image Printer driver by tariel will allow you to convert a PDF to multiple page image files in several image formats. This is not all The Virtual Image Printer and it is not exclusively for converting PDF to images. However, it is very handy for performing this task under the Windows XP operating system.

Linux PDF Tools: tiff2ps and ps2pdf

On Linux the tiff2ps command is part of libtiff-tools. The command line tools in libtiff-tools include tiffcp, tiff2ps', tiffdump and tiffsplit. Windows executables for libtiff-tools can be found at stillhq.com, e.g. http://www.stillhq.com/libtiff/win32/3.5.4/tiffcp.exe and http://www.stillhq.com/libtiff/win32/3.5.4/tiff2ps.exe

The Linux ps2pdf command is part of Ghostscript. Those command line tools are ps2pdf, gs or gswin32 (Win32 version). Ghostscript for Windows is gs651w32.exe

Netpbm for Windows is netpbm-9.19-bin.zip and requires Cygwin.

make pdf: from tiff, Use Tiff to PS (in linux)

tiff2ps *.tiff > tiffs.ps

from PS to PDF

ps2pdf tiffs.ps

Print to PDF in Windows

CutePDF Writer

There is a free version and a more feature rich pay version on their web site, http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp

Convert Images to PDF in Windows

Free Image to PDF Converter. Supported formats are BMP, DIB, GIF, JPEG, JPG, JPE, JFIF, PNG, TIFF,TIF. Multiple files to a multi-page PDF. The tool combines multiple directories and images into one PDF.

Installer: PDFdu_Image_To_PDF_setup.exe
Developer Web Site: http://pdfdu.com/app/image-to-pdf-converter.aspx

References

Last modified on 7 February 2013, at 13:43