For Node.js there is a nice library called PDFKit (https://pdfkit.org/) which offers a canvas-like API for drawing graphics, text with ttf fonts, and other graphcal elements. I would say it's pretty good if you need exact control over the PDF output.
Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
21–30 of 109 posts
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#22The fact that you have to pay to see the standard should tell you everything you need to know.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#23Make use of TeX and Friends source code for handling PDF symbols, then it is much easier to check different implementations. For example, TikZ/PGF package has both PS and PDF implementations of the same graphical objects. So you can see how PDF literals or PS specials come into object stream.
Also it is really not that cryptic but very much laborious, hence many people rely on classical tools to generate PDF instead of handcrafting pdf files from scratch. Here is a nice introduction from a decade ago for you https://blog.idrsolutions.com/2010/09/grow-your-own-pdf-file...
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#24Cause it belongs to Adobe and they clearly don’t want to make it easy for developers to work with it.
The PDF specification, hosted by Adobe, free for you to download… (pay attention, this is a big PDF) https://opensource.adobe.com/dc-acrobat-sdk-docs/standards/p... Adobe specifically negotiated to make this freely available.
From the document:
This document you are now reading is a copy of the ISO 32000-1 standard. By agreement with ISO, Adobe Systems is allowed to offer this version of the ISO standard as a free PDF file on it's web site. It is not an official ISO document but the technical content is identical including the section numbering and page numbering.
I include that, so you can Google up a copy when the URL changes again. (Copy is disabled, I had to retype it. The misuse of "it's" is present in the original.)
As afar as I know, they have always posted the PDF format for free. ISO’s business model is different, they pay the bills by selling the documents.
For generating PDF, assuming you aren’t some sort of sociopath that wants to embed JavaScript or some custom plugin, then you can just drop back to 1.3 or so and deal with a simpler spec. Use the parts you need, ignore the rest.
Some time around 2000 I wrote a PDF generator to do my type setting, so that was 1.2 or 1.3. Very straightforward format.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#25Simplest way to generate pdf is to generate xsl-fo document which is good old XML and then convert it to PDF using one of the processors, e.g. Apache FOP.
Seconded. Don't waste life wrangling raw PDF.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#26Most 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... w…
Hello. Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into ReportLab and the older versions of PDF. I am trying to avoid the whole PostScript / GhostScript route since my primary goal is to generate a PDF as fast as possible.
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#27Wouldn't that be nice.
Not directly answering your question, but I suppose the solution is to just pick the closest thing and convert. HTML&CSS being the most full-featured/generic. Markdown simplest for basic 'word processing'. Latex good for more advanced such cases. Images good for others. Maybe ePub would suit your 'typographical' needs (I think it's a lot more open than PDF, and itself HTML based)?
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#28Try this:
https://web.archive.org/web/*/https://www.adobe.com/content/...
Edit: Nevermind, see this comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31267227
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#29Most 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... w…
Hello. Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into ReportLab and the older versions of PDF. I am trying to avoid the whole PostScript / GhostScript route since my primary goal is to generate a PDF as fast as possible.
Usually what's slow is the layout computation, not the PDF text serialization of it, which is pretty efficient. Though I found that ReportLab was adding lots of metadata to all my links, resulting in an overall large filesize, and because it targets a pre-1.6 version the links were all uncompressed (though the page contents were compressed, which has been a feature of PDF for a long time).
Re: Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
#30Not 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.
Understood. Is your project open source? I'm curious to see what the solution looks like when you sort it out. I feel like there must be a lot of heavy lifting (but also a lot of cruft if all you care about is a narrow case) being done by pdflatex to get to an output pdf. It will be interesting to see what the minimal solution looks like.