Building a Simple PDF - PDF Explained - page 13

CHAPTER 2
Building a Simple PDF
In this chapter, we'll build PDF content manually in a text editor. Then we'll use the
free pdftk program to turn it into a valid PDF file and look at the output in a PDF viewer.
This example, together with all the PDF files in this topic, can be downloaded from the
web page for this topic .
We'll be looking at a lot of new concepts all at once, so don't worry if it seems
overwhelming—we'll come back to all of this in future chapters.
pdftk—The PDF Toolkit
pdftk is a free, open source command-line tool for Microsoft Windows, Mac OS X, and
Unix. We're going to use it in this chapter (and throughout this topic) to turn PDF
content we've written in a text editor into a valid PDF file. pdftk can also be used to:
Merge and split PDF documents
Rotate PDF pages
Decrypt and encrypt
Fill PDF forms with data
Apply watermarks and stamps
Print and change PDF metadata
Attach files to PDF documents
Source and binary packages for pdftk can be found at PDF Labs .
The creator of pdftk , Sid Steward, is also the author of O'Reilly's PDF Hacks —a selec-
tion of tools and tips for working with PDF.