PDF knowledge
Find articles that provide you with practical insight into the world of PDFs. Learn all the ins and outs of PDFs, from the fundamentals to the best practices.
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The versatility of a PDF viewer
Almost every user knows: a PDF viewer is not just a display tool for a well known document format. It provides many more functions, runs on many platforms, offers interfaces in many technologies and serves as an importan ...
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How to deal with poor PDF quality
"Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten", says a Gucci family slogan. Nevertheless, creators of PDF documents, private users up to large companies, regularly produce files with insufficient quality causi ...
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Importing images into a PDF file - a seemingly trivial task
A picture is worth a thousand words. That's why they are fondly embedded in PDF files. One would expect that embedding images in a PDF file is a simple task. Because it seems so easy, there are also many, including free, ...
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Does OCR make sense for digitally generated PDFs?
Scanned PDF files usually consist of one raster image for each page. The OCR engine can recognize the text in this image and make the document searchable. But what about digitally generated documents?
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The Advantages of PDF/A-3 in Practice
PDF is a widely used digital document format for secure and easy access to documents. The latest version of the format, PDF/A-3, offers the added benefit of being able to store and archive files of any format, including ...
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Electronic Signatures – A Crash Course
What is a reliable way to digitally sign documents? In this article, we'll explain the differences between electronic signatures and digital signatures, explore the types of signatures used in practice, and discuss the b ...
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Can linearization be combined with digitial signatures and PDF/A conformance?
Linearization is a feature to optimize PDF files for sequential reading. Although it is very useful in web based applications it interferes with other features such as digital signatures.
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Are the PDF/A space requirements a show stopper for archiving?
A PDF/A document requires that all resources such as fonts, color profiles, etc. must be embedded in the file. The archiving of transactional documents can be nightmare because such documents are usually short by nature ...
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Scan to PDF/A - some insights
Traditionally a scanner produces a TIFF or JPEG image for each page. Some of them can directly produce PDF files. And newer devices produce files conforming to the PDF/A standard. However, the quality of the produced fil ...
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Handling embedded and non-embedded fonts in PDF & PDF/A documents
Although the first part of the PDF/A standard was published in 2005 there is still a need for some clarifications regarding fonts and embedding. What does the standard exactly require? How should PDF to PDF/A converters ...
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PDF 2.0 - A quick overview
It is rare for industrial products to survive for more than 20 years – especially in the IT industry. Not even the inventors of the PDF could have imagined just how successful their file format would be when they launche ...
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PAdES - PDF Advanced Electronic Signature
What is PAdES? What does it have to do with PDF? What can PAdES do? For all these questions, there are detailed answers on the web. This article is meant to give a brief overview as a small guide in the jungle of terms.