How to open PDF raw?

Question

I\'ve been wanting to see the insides of a PDF for a while, like, the raw source code of it so I can look at it. Any way of doing that?

Answer 1

In addition to the qpdf tool conversion into postscript might be helpful. PDF is a subset of PS. Usually its quite easy to figure out, e.g. where the labels of a graph are. You can either use pdf2ps or invoke ghostscript

gs -sDEVICE=pswrite some.pdf -sOutputFile=some.ps -dNOPAUSE -c quit

When you generate your PDFs using pdflatex you can disable compression with an option. This makes the PDF more readable.