Developing with PDF: Dive Into the Portable Document Format

THANX YOU..!!-sign JINX "she wouldn't leave me alone,"

Goes through the internals of PDF document and it's overall spec.

I bought this book to help me finish a PDF generator I was working on that required imposition. I opened up the book in the morning and by mid afternoon I had fixed the issues I was having. The book is very easy to follow and provides a quick overview of the PDF format in plain English.As others have pointed out, this book is not a replacement for the spec. Instead, it is a great companion piece to help you understand how parts of the format work under the hood with tips to help you go deeper.Despite this, there are some parts I wish had more detail. I really would have liked a bigger section dedicated to font encoding.

Just by looking at the Table of Contents of Developing with PDF, I knew I didn't know didly squat about PDF. Oh sure, I've used it to read PDF documents, as well to save Word documents in this particular format. But I didn't know how to create a new PDF document, even though I have Adobe Acrobat Pro, which is part of the Adobe Master Collection CS4, which I acquired while attending school at ITT-Tech.Mr. Rosenthol covers it all; syntax, imaging model, images, text and navigation to mention just a few items from the Table of Contents. I didn't know, for instance, that you can embed files such as multimedia and 3D into a PDF document. I didn't know about annotations, acroforms, metadata or standards. Looks like I have a lot of reading and catching up to do.I truly appreciate Mr. Rosenthol's effort to teach us what we need to know about PDF documents. Regardless of whether you use Adobe Acrobat for professional reasons, for reading and just want to know more about it and how it works or you intend to code and want to know more, this book is for you.Many people use programs without understanding anything about it. I think if you want to get more use from programs, regardless of whether it is free or cost a bundle, then you owe it to yourself to educate yourself it. When we understand something, we usually get more use out of it. Isn't that the end reason for acquiring a program to begin with? We acquired it so that we can use it to the fullest extent of our ability. Otherwise, regardless of whether it is free or bought, it just takes up space on your hard drive and gathers dust.I would definitely recommend this book to others.

This book gives a clear and concise overview of the PDF format and it's internals: how it's structured, what you can do with it, and how you do these things, all illustrated with example PDF snippets.The level of detail of the book is just right, explaining just what you need to know to get a decent understanding of how things work, and even how you would go about writing applications that use PDF. Had it had one level more of detail, the book would probably be close the ISO standard, be too boring to read, and only of interest to a very limited set of people writing PDF consumers and producers. I'm very glad the author did not fall into the trap of rewriting the PDF reference.One thing that felt missing to me (and which was explicitly mentioned as omitted) is how fonts are embedded in PDFs. The author may have good reasons for not including this (maybe it's tedious and uninteresting), but it would have been nice to have the reason listed. That said, the text seems to hint that this may be included in a future version of the book.In conclusion, although I'm not planning on developing PDF applications myself, I found the entire book a very interesting read.

I found this book a very useful introduction while writing my first PDF code.Even with this book, I found it occasionally necessary to consult the PDF specification. There's a free copy of that on Adobe's website (at [...] However, the complete specification is not a good introduction.The sample code in this introduction uses PDF operators. These operators are named for brevity rather than readability. If you're trying to understand the code, sometimes it's necessary to back up in the text until you find where the operator is first used and described. The book would be improved by a table of these operators mapped to descriptions. The index includes items for the operators. However, the index requires two steps: finding the operator in the index, amidst many other items, and then finding the page it references.There is such a table in the PDF specification on Adobe's website, in Annex A. Printing that and having it next to this introduction can be very useful.This book does not presume that you're using a particular computer language, library or development environment. The examples show only PDF code itself.This book is useful even if you're using a library to create the PDF document. A library's API documentation may describe how each class and method wraps lower-level PDF constructs. But the root PDF concepts are not necessarily included in the library's documentation.

Its ok as an introduction for the specification and overall document structure and format. But to really work with pdf, you have to use the public pdf specification, that really has all de information. Adding, the fonts specifications ...

This is one of the most confusing books I have ever tried to understand. Like many other books published in recent years, it has a generous share of typos, awkward English, and what seem like mistakes or contradictions, but the main reason why it is so confusing is that it raises hosts of questions it doesn't even attempt to answer. The full standard, which is available on the Internet free of charge, makes much more sense to me. I have also found two short articles on the Web that are far more comprehensible and helpful than this book, but I am not allowed to include the URLs in this review. Someone needs to write a book on this topic in a tutorial format.

Wie bisher jedes Buch diese Verlags seitens Inhalt und Form sehr gut gestaltet, für alle geeignet die sich tiefer mit dem PDF-Standard befassen müssen um z.B Dateien zu analysieren, zu modifizieren oder eigene Lösungen zu entwicklen.

Comprehensive description of PDF development. Getting a little aged but the fundamentals are cover very well.

a well written book- and for technical book, a good read.

This book is an odd one, it's technical in nature but glosses over a lot of details. There's no real sense that it's aimed at getting the reader to a level of understanding for any real-world purpose. It's so sparse compared to what is in the full PDF spec that the reader will be left with huge gaps in their knowledge.The full PDF spec is available from Adobe online, it's many many more pages than this book, and is annotated to a level that easily equals any "insights" that this book brings. If you need to understand the PDF format that is by far a better option.

Before starting reading this book I thought that PDF is the most complex data structure I've ever found in my 30 years as IT professional. After reading half of the book I'm astonished about the beauty and simplicity of this binary format.