This section tells how to use ImageGear PDF component.

• Getting Started with PDF
• • Tutorial: Create Your First PDF Project
• How to...
• • Load and Save a PDF
  • Convert...
  • • PDF to Image
    • PDF to Multi-Page Image
    • Image to PDF
  • Merge Multiple PDFs
  • Split a PDF Document
  • Compress a PDF Document
  • Use PDF Security
  • Manage PDF Content
  • • Manage PDF Metadata
    • Edit PDF Content and Fonts
    • Extract Text from a PDF
    • Add Image to PDF Document
    • Watermarks and Annotations in a PDF
    • Containers, Dictionaries, and Layers
    • 3D Artwork
  • Process PDF Using Multiple Threads
  • Work with PDF Format Compliance
  • • About ISO Standards and Compliance
    • Verify PDF Format Compliance

This topic provides some background information about PDF and PostScript.

PostScript Language (PS)

The PostScript Language (PS) is a simple interpretive programming language with powerful graphics capabilities. Its primary application is to describe the appearance of text, graphical shapes, and sampled images on printed or displayed pages, according to the Adobe® imaging model. A program in this language can communicate a description of a document from a composition system to a printing system or control the appearance of text and graphics on a display. The description is high-level and device-independent.

Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF)

The Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) is the native file format of the Adobe® Acrobat® family of products. PDF relies on the same imaging model as the PostScript page description language to describe text and graphics in a device-independent and resolution-independent manner. A document can be converted between PDF and the PostScript language; the two representations produce the same output when printed. To improve performance for interactive viewing, PDF defines a more structured format than that used by most PostScript language programs. PDF also includes objects, such as annotations and hypertext links that are not part of the page itself but are useful for interactive viewing and document interchange. However, PDF lacks the general-purpose programming language framework of the PostScript language.

Using the ImageGear PDF API allows you to load, save, edit and process native PDF and PostScript documents. The ImageGear PDF Component can also perform rasterization of PDF and PostScript documents, converting them to bitmaps. The component also provides you with the ability to extract text from loaded PDF and PostScript documents

ImageGear PDF component provides full multi-page reading and writing support for the entire document as well as specified set of pages. You can detect, read, write, append, insert, replace, swap and delete a specified page in the PDF document.

Content Editing

Content editing provides an API for creating, accessing and editing PDF page content objects. With this API you can work with a page's content as with a list of such objects like images, texts, forms. Retain, modify and save their data and properties.

Document Fonts

Document font support includes:

• Listing the fonts available in the host system and finding a system font that matches a PDF font
• Creating a font from the system font and encoding as well as from the specified attributes
• Changing font's information
• Editing and embedding a font in the document
• Both single and multiple bytes fonts are supported

Word Extraction

Text words extraction includes:

• Extracting words from a PDF document or specified page
• Enumerating and sorting the words
• Getting word layouts, styles and characters

Document Metadata

You can get and set PDF document metadata corresponding to a document's Info dictionary.

Native Printing

Native PDF document printing now renders the document content directly to the printer, so it is fast and requires less memory.