Portable Document Format (PDF)

File format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Based on the PostScript language, each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images and other information needed to display it.
— Wikipedia

My E-library is consisting mostly of PDF files. This format not “flexible”, unlike epub for example, so usually it’s looking good on large screens, on phone there some zooming issues.

Some vector (Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator) and raster graphics editors (GIMP) can export to PDF, it’s useful as intermediate format especially for vector graphics.

I also have resume in this format.

Recipes

Resize PDF pages, as dimensions used pdfinfo information:

input_file="./Evans-want_to_be_a_wizard.pdf"
input_file_dimensions="$(LC_ALL=C pdfinfo $input_file| LC_ALL=C awk '/^Page size:/ {printf "{%fbp,%fbp}", $3, $5}')"
echo $input_file_dimensions
 
# Start acutual conversion after verification
pdfjam --papersize "$input_file_dimensions" "$input_file" --outfile output.pdf

To-do

• PostScript → PDF conversion example.
• PostScript’s information
• Review PDF libraries, client-side, JS-based, etc.

Tools

• pdfunite (part of poppler) - merge PDF files, usage: pdfunite file1.pdf file2.pdf merged.pdf