The ABC of PDF with iText

The ABC of PDF with iText

PDF Syntax essentials

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.

About the Author

iText Software
iText Software

iText® is one of the world's leading PDF libraries. It enables developers looking to enhance web- and other applications with dynamic PDF document generation and/or manipulation. iText has been around as free/open source software since 2000, offering the best documented, best performing and most feature rich open source PDF engine available in Java and C#.

Bruno Lowagie is the original developer of iText. He is the author of two "iText in Action" books published by Manning. He's the CEO of the iText Group.

Table of Contents

    • Introduction
  • I Part 1: The Carousel Object System
    • 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
    • 2. PDF File Structure
      • 2.1 The internal structure of a PDF file
      • 2.2 Variations on the file structure
      • 2.3 Summary
    • 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
  • II Part 2: The Adobe Imaging Model
    • 4. Graphics State
      • 4.1 Understanding the syntax
      • 4.2 Graphics State Operators
      • 4.3 Summary
    • 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
  • III Part 3: Annotations and form fields
    • 7. Annotations
    • 8. Interactive forms

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