[HN Gopher] Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
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       Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?
        
       I am working on some typographical software that is supposed to
       generate PDFs at the end. It seems like there is no accessible
       information on how to do this. The PDF ISO specification is behind
       a paywall and has a dead link to a 2008 spec. There are open source
       converters like pandoc, but nothing that actually writes to PDF
       that I can find. Is there any resource that goes over the process
       of PDF generation?
        
       Author : shawnfrostx
       Score  : 5 points
       Date   : 2022-05-04 22:26 UTC (34 minutes ago)
        
       | tmaly wrote:
       | I know there is a perl module that can write low level parts of
       | pdf but it only supports 1.4 or 1.5 version
        
       | version_five wrote:
       | Not really answering your question but you could consider
       | generating postscript output and then using ghostscript to
       | convert it to pdf. That would let you create and write arbitrary
       | stuff. I think pandoc uses pdflatex to generate a pdf via latex
       | from the internal pandoc representation.
       | 
       | Imagemagick also writes to pdf I believe, but it may only convert
       | raster images. With postscript you can generate a vector pdf
        
       | zzo38computer wrote:
       | I think PDF is no good; I think is too messy. I think that better
       | formats can be possible, such as maybe PCL, and I have some of my
       | own ideas of making a better format, too.
       | 
       | However, PDF is a commonly used format.
       | 
       | When I wanted to generate PDF (or other formats such as PNG), I
       | just wrote a PostScript program to do (and then run it through
       | Ghostscript). (Drivers could also be added to make other output
       | formats too if wanted.)
        
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       (page generated 2022-05-04 23:00 UTC)