How do you debug PDF files?

Question

Many times I create a PDF either programmatically and there might be a problem with it, e.g. some specific letter might no show up well or I might have encoding issues etc.<

Answer 1

This is what I usually do in Linux:

• Install qpdf package and run qpdf --qdf --object-streams=disable orig.pdf decoded.pdf . Now you can open decoded.pdf in a text editor and see the pdf source.

• Also I installed PDFedit on linux which has a gui program which let you inspect all the pdf structure, from the comfort of a graphical interface.