Portable Document Features

The report containing my experience collaborating with the GNU PDF project is available for download here (look for the link named 73459.pdf). It contains useful information for newcomers, as well as a complete log of developments, experiences and interactions performed during this period.

Presentation slides (in catalan!) are available here.

The Final Degree Project is done, but GNU PDF goes on, so stay tunned for news!

The PDF file format, far from being a unique language definition, gathers an extensive family of sublanguages (which we friendly call dialects) and specifications. These specifications make the format richer, and allow a better fitting between the language restrictions and requirements of real scenarios. On the other hand, the library has to consider all these sublanguages and specifications to correctly read and write PDF files.

Thus, these specifications must be studied, compared and formalised, in order to allow the GNU PDF Library provide an API capable of processing syntax and semantics accordingly.

This study is contained in the GNU PDF Knowledge base, available here. Until now, only the comparison between PDF/A and PDF 1.4 is available, but more sublanguages of the PDF family are coming in the near future. Stay tunned!

All documentation in GNU PDF, as in many other free software projects, is written using texinfo. Texinfo is a documentation format by Richard Stallman and Bob Chassell, which aims to integrate all the project documentation in a unique source, and then produce any desired output document format in an automatic and transparent way. As described in the official page:

Texinfo uses a single source file to produce output in a number of formats, both online and printed (dvi, html, info, pdf, xml, etc.). This means that instead of writing different documents for online information and another for a printed manual, you need write only one document. And when the work is revised, you need revise only that one document.

Several tools and scripts are available from the usual repositories to transform texi files to html or pdf files. In Debian-like systems, they can be installed issuing:

This should make available in your system the texi2html and texi2pdf binaries, which you can use to convert texi files into html or pdf files:

Now you can read all GNU PDF manuals in your favourite format. Hope this helps!