Difference between revisions of "PDF: The Portable Document Format"

Revision as of 14:44, 6 November 2007

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

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