About PDF Press

PDF Press is a site for anything to do with PDF, the Portable Document Format.

What it's for

For now, PDF Press is for research, study and education: material for learning how PDF files work and where the format is defined. Software may be published here in the future.

What's here

Learning

How a PDF file is put together, from the bytes on disk to the pixels on the page, anchored on PDF 1.4 and PDF 1.7, one topic per page.

Reference

Tables to look things up in: content-stream operators, filters, color spaces, blend modes, fonts, annotations, actions and structure types, each with the version that added it.

Specifications

Every PDF version from 1.0 to 2.0, with links to where each specification, set of errata and extension can be downloaded or ordered.

About the specifications

PDF Press doesn't host the specifications themselves. The specs page links to the publishers, the PDF Association and web archives, and each document stays under its publisher's terms.