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Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?

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Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?

#11

Post by shawnfrostx »

version_five wrote: post #3

Not 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

Hello. My project is essentially a replacement for a small subset of LaTeX. I use LaTeX for a lot of my own work but the massive amount of converters going from LaTeX to PDF is the reason I started this project in the first place.

Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?

#16

Post by kragen »

Most recently I used ReportLab for direct PDF writing from Python¹, but generating them from PostScript is often easier², depending on what you're doing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PDF#External_links has a lot of information; also the "Further reading" section has some links which Adobe has broken at the moment, but archive.org versions of them like https://web.archive.org/web/20200127173721/https://www.adobe... work. Also I think Adobe put PDF 1.7 on the Archive themselves: https://archive.org/details/pdf1.7

The ReportLab APIs mirror the PDF file structure relatively closely.

Don't listen to the people who are nattering on about how PDF is proprietary on purpose. I think that may have been the case in its early years but it hasn't been the case this millennium.

PDF 1.7 (the spec from 02008) and even earlier verions are most often used, as you'll see if you run head -1 *.pdf in a directory with a lot of random PDFs. PDF 2.0 is not important and you may want to intentionally write an earlier version for broader compatibility. The big incompatibility is actually PDF 1.5 to 1.6: 1.6 added compressed object streams, and a lot of readers still don't support those.

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¹ https://github.com/kragen/dercuano/blob/master/genpdf.py

² http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/laserboot/Makefile

Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?

#17

Post by Const-me »

Find a library.

Couple years ago I needed to generate PDF reports, relatively complicated ones: headers/footers/backgrounds, page numbers, complex tables, jpeg bitmaps, custom vector graphics in diagrams, etc. This one did the job: https://www.nuget.org/packages/iTextSharp-LGPL

Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?

#19

Post by chrisseaton »

> There are open source converters like pandoc

I don't think Pandoc knows anything about the PDF format. It can't read it https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/tree/master/src/Text/Pandoc/Re... or write it https://github.com/jgm/pandoc/tree/master/src/Text/Pandoc/Wr.... It uses other tools to do that.

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