Portable Document Features

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!

In its very first 5 months of life, Portable Document Features has reached 1,000 visitors. Most of you have been coming from gnupdf.org or planet.gnu.org, but some others have reached the blog googling around about how to install the GNU PDF Library on your systems, how to start up with hacking the lib or just engaging some discussion on the lib issues. The goal for the next months, as I will be finishing my FDP, is to continue reporting library hacks and log a more low-level trace of what I’m exactly hacking

Thank you very much for you support!