I am working on some typographical software that is supposed to generate PDFs at the end. It seems like there is no accessible information on how to do this. The PDF ISO specification is behind a paywall and has a dead link to a 2008 spec. There are open source converters like pandoc, but nothing that actually writes to PDF that I can find. Is there any resource that goes over the process of PDF generation?
Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
1–10 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#2I know there is a perl module that can write low level parts of pdf but it only supports 1.4 or 1.5 version
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#3Not really answering your question but you could consider generating postscript output and then using ghostscript to convert it to pdf. That would let you create and write arbitrary stuff. I think pandoc uses pdflatex to generate a pdf via latex from the internal pandoc representation.
Imagemagick also writes to pdf I believe, but it may only convert raster images. With postscript you can generate a vector pdf
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#4I think PDF is no good; I think is too messy. I think that better formats can be possible, such as maybe PCL, and I have some of my own ideas of making a better format, too.
However, PDF is a commonly used format.
When I wanted to generate PDF (or other formats such as PNG), I just wrote a PostScript program to do (and then run it through Ghostscript). (Drivers could also be added to make other output formats too if wanted.)
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#5ask Leonard R. -- it stretches back to the pre-Internet "multimedia" competition..
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#6The only link I could find was an archive link https://archive.org/details/pdf1.7
The open PDF standard now costs 250 USD. Adobe is supposed to have an archive of the 1.7 spec online but they do not care enough to keep that up it appears.
I am trying to think of a reason why they would do such a blindly dumb thing but the C++ people used to do the same thing.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#7[deleted]
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#8Cause it belongs to Adobe and they clearly don’t want to make it easy for developers to work with it.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#9The only link I could find was an archive link https://archive.org/details/pdf1.7 The open PDF standard now costs 250 USD. Adobe is supposed to have an archive of the 1.7 spec online but they do not care enough to keep that up it appears. I am trying to think of a reason why they would do such a blindly dumb thing but the C++ people used to do the same thing.
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Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#10Try OpenPDF
https://github.com/LibrePDF/OpenPDF