Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed

by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner
independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems.[2][3] Based on
the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat
document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to
display it. PDF has its roots in "The Camelot Project" initiated by Adobe co-founder John Warnock in
1991.[4] PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008.[5] The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was
published in December 2020.

PDF files may contain a variety of content besides flat text and graphics including logical
structuring elements, interactive elements such as annotations and form-fields, layers, rich
media (including video content), three-dimensional objects using U3D or PRC, and various
other data formats. The PDF specification also provides for encryption and digital signatures, file
attachments, and metadata to enable workflows requiring these features.

History

[edit]

Main article: History of PDF

The development of PDF began in 1991 when John Warnock wrote a paper for a project then code-
named Camelot, in which he proposed the creation of a simplified version of PostScript called
Interchange PostScript (IPS).[6] Unlike traditional PostScript, which was tightly focused on
rendering print jobs to output devices, IPS would be optimized for displaying pages to any screen
and any platform.[6]

Adobe Systems made the PDF specification available free of charge in 1993. In the early years PDF
was popular mainly in desktop publishing workflows, and competed with several other formats,
including DjVu, Envoy, Common Ground Digital Paper, Farallon Replica and even Adobe's own
PostScript format.

PDF was a proprietary format controlled by Adobe until it was released as an open standard on July
1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO 32000-
1:2008,[7][8] at which time control of the specification passed to an ISO Committee of volunteer
industry experts. In 2008, Adobe published a Public Patent License to ISO 32000-1 granting royalty-
free rights for all patents owned by Adobe necessary to make, use, sell, and distribute PDF-
compliant implementations.[9]

PDF 1.7, the sixth edition of the PDF specification that became ISO 32000-1, includes some
proprietary technologies defined only by Adobe, such as Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA)
and JavaScript extension for Acrobat, which are referenced by ISO 32000-1 as normative and
indispensable for the full implementation of the ISO 32000-1 specification.[10] These proprietary
technologies are not standardized, and their specification is published only on Adobe's
website.[11][12][13] Many of them are not supported by popular third-party implementations of PDF.

ISO published version 2.0 of PDF, ISO 32000-2 in 2017, available for purchase, replacing the free
specification provided by Adobe.[14] In December 2020, the second edition of PDF 2.0, ISO 32000-
2:2020, was published, with clarifications, corrections, and critical updates to normative
references[15] (ISO 32000-2 does not include any proprietary technologies as normative
references).[16] In April 2023 the PDF Association made ISO 32000-2 available for download free of
charge.[14]

Technical details

[edit]

A PDF file is often a combination of vector graphics, text, and bitmap graphics. The basic types of
content in a PDF are:

• Typeset text stored as content streams (i.e., not encoded in plain text);

• Vector graphics for illustrations and designs that consist of shapes and lines;

• Raster graphics for photographs and other types of images; and

• Other multimedia objects.

In later PDF revisions, a PDF document can also support links (inside document or web page),
forms, JavaScript (initially available as a plugin for Acrobat 3.0), or any other types of embedded
contents that can be handled using plug-ins.

PDF combines three technologies:

• An equivalent subset of the PostScript page description programming language but in

• A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents.

• A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a
single file, with data compression where appropriate.

PostScript language

[edit]

PostScript is a page description language run in an interpreter to generate an image.[6] It can handle
graphics and has standard features of programming languages such
as branching and looping.[6] PDF is a subset of PostScript, simplified to remove such control
flow features, while graphics commands remain.[6]

PostScript was originally designed for a drastically different use case: transmission of one-way
linear print jobs in which the PostScript interpreter would collect a series of commands until it
encountered the showpage command, then execute all the commands to render a page as a raster
image to a printing device.[17] PostScript was not intended for long-term storage and real-time
interactive rendering of electronic documents to computer monitors, so there was no need to
support anything other than consecutive rendering of pages.[17] If there was an error in the final
printed output, the user would correct it at the application level and send a new print job in the form
of an entirely new PostScript file. Thus, any given page in a PostScript file could be accurately
rendered only as the cumulative result of executing all preceding commands to draw all previous
pages—any of which could affect subsequent pages—plus the commands to draw that particular
page, and there was no easy way to bypass that process to skip around to different pages.[17]

Traditionally, to go from PostScript to PDF, a source PostScript file (that is, an executable program)
is used as the basis for generating PostScript-like PDF code (see, e.g., Adobe Distiller). This is done
by applying standard compiler techniques like loop unrolling, inlining and removing unused
branches, resulting in code that is purely declarative and static.[17] The end result is then packaged
into a container format, together with all necessary dependencies for correct rendering (external
files, graphics, or fonts to which the document refers), and compressed. Modern applications write
to printer drivers that directly generate PDF rather than going through PostScript first.

As a document format, PDF has several advantages over PostScript:

• PDF contains only static declarative PostScript code that can be processed as data, and
does not require a full program interpreter or compiler.[17] This avoids the complexity and
security risks of an engine with such a higher complexity level.

• Like Display PostScript, PDF has supported transparent graphics since version 1.4, while
standard PostScript does not.

• PDF enforces the rule that the code for any particular page cannot affect any other
pages.[17] That rule is strongly recommended for PostScript code too, but has to be
implemented explicitly (see, e.g., the Document Structuring Conventions), as PostScript is
a full programming language that allows for such greater flexibilities and is not limited to the
concepts of pages and documents.

• All data required for rendering is included within the file itself, improving portability. [18]