The ABC of PDF with iText
Last updated on 2015-01-06
About the Book
This book is a vademecum for my other books entitled "Create your PDFs with iText," "Update your PDFs with iText," and "Sign your PDFs with iText."
In the past, we used to refer to ISO-32000 whenever somebody asked "why can't I use PDF as a format for editing documents" or whenever somebody wanted to use a feature that wasn't supported out-of-the-box.
Although it wasn't always our intention, answering "read the specs" was lethal for the conversation as the spec consists of more than a thousand pages. In this short book, I'd like to give a short introduction to the syntax of the Portable Document Format. It's not the definitive guide, but it should be sufficient to help you out when reading the other iText books.
Table of Contents
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- Introduction
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I Part 1: The Carousel Object System
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1. PDF Objects
- 1.1 The basic PDF objects
- 1.2 iText’s PdfObject implementations
- 1.3 The difference between direct and indirect objects
- 1.4 Summary
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2. PDF File Structure
- 2.1 The internal structure of a PDF file
- 2.2 Variations on the file structure
- 2.3 Summary
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3. PDF Document Structure
- 3.1 Viewing a document as a tree structure using RUPS
- 3.2 Obtaining objects from a PDF using PdfReader
- 3.3 Examining the page tree
- 3.4 Examining a page dictionary
- 3.5 Optional entries of the Document Catalog Dictionary
- 3.6 Summary
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1. PDF Objects
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II Part 2: The Adobe Imaging Model
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4. Graphics State
- 4.1 Understanding the syntax
- 4.2 Graphics State Operators
- 4.3 Summary
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5. Text State
- 5.1 Text objects
- 5.2 Introducing fonts
- 5.3 Using fonts in PDF
- 5.4 Using fonts in iText
- 5.5 Summary
- 6. Marked Content
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4. Graphics State
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III Part 3: Annotations and form fields
- 7. Annotations
- 8. Interactive forms
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