PDF specifications for coders: Adobe or ISO?

Question

I want to code an application that can read and decode a pdf document; now where I\'m supposed to get the specs for this fileformat ? The PDF format is standardized from the

Answer 1

PDF is not a lightweight format. It is basically postscript with compression on top. An existing library is definitely what you want to use, not write your own. It's a huge task.

Or get an existing PDF writer application, and start it from within your program.

I haven't looked at it very much, but libgnupdf looks OK.

According to Wikipedia PDF combines three technologies:

• A subset of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the layout and graphics.
• 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.