Functions
The Adobe PDF Library is our most popular SDK. It is available on more platforms, and has a broader range of functionality than any of our other toolkits. Our customers are using the Adobe PDF Library to:
- Build PDF viewers
- Print PDFs progammatically
- Convert PDFs to PostScript or EPS
- Rasterize PDFs to JPEG or other image formats
- Extract text and images from PDFs
- Merge, split, stamp, add bookmarks, password-protect and otherwise manipulate PDFs in some manner
- Create PDFs programmatically
If you have any sort of PDF-related technical requirement, chances are good that the Adobe PDF Library could meet it.
Building a PDF Viewer
The Adobe PDF Library SDK contains powerful APIs which enable developers to build PDF viewing functionality into their applications. These APIs are the same ones that power the rendering functionality of Reader and Acrobat, so compatibility is virtually guaranteed.
Many of our customers are using these rendering APIs in their applications. They've built their own viewer because they don't want to spawn a Reader process for viewing, and lose control of the user experience; or they've already built their own viewer (with their own controls) for a number of file formats, and are looking to extend that viewer to support PDF.
In any case, many customers have simply used our "DLViewer" code sample as the basis of their production application. We provide a number of viewing code samples which illustrate how to:
- display a PDF page on screen
- page backwards and forwards in a document, jump to a specified page number
- rotate the page in 90 degree increments
- increase and decrease page scaling (zooming)
- generate appearances for link and text annotations for display
- mark annotations as printing when a document is printed
- extract text and determine its position on the page
- extract and play multimedia streams (e.g., Flash)
- open and display components of a PDF package
Printing existing PDF files on a target printing device
The Adobe PDF Library includes printing APIs which give you controls to:
- specify PostScript level (when outputting to PostScript)
- embed or not embed fonts
- print using overprint preview or not
- process transparencies using AGM, the same engine used in the Acrobat family of products
- print optional content groups (layers) and annotations
- scale pages, including shrink-to-fit
- print via drawing directly to device context, giving you greater interactive control over the printing process
Printing to PostScript
The Adobe PDF Library SDK can be used to programmatically convert PDFs to PostScript via the PDFLPrintDoc() API.
Rasterizing using the Adobe PDF Library SDK
The Adobe PDF Library SDK can be used to rasterize PDFs - we use it ourselves in our PDF2IMG toolkit.
Content Extraction
Text and image extraction APIs enable you to:
- extract text for indexing
- extract text style, position information, and encoding
- extract the visible words on the page (i.e., words on the specified page that are visible in the given optional-content context)
- extract content and information about annotations, including links and bookmarks
- extract form (AcroForm) field data, both content and field descriptor metadata
- extract metadata such as Title, Subject, and other document-level attributes
- extract images and convert to image formats including PNG, JPEG, TIFF, etc.
- convert images to CMYK, RGB or Grayscale
Edit/Manipulate PDFs
There are over 800 API calls in the Adobe PDF Library SDK, including capabilities for:
- adding, removing or editing text
- embedding and subsetting fonts
- processing images
- adding, removing or editing bookmarks
- adding, removing or editing annotations
- password-protecting PDFs
- "stamping" PDFs with headers/footers or watermarks
- accessing and manipulating metadata information
- merging and splitting PDFs
Create PDFs
Creating PDFs using the Adobe PDF Library SDK involves instantiating pages of a PDF document, and placing images and lines of text at X/Y coordinates on the page. The Adobe PDF Library SDK contains optimizations to boost performance of PDF creation in high-volume applications: if you are creating PDFs with a large number of pages, or creating a large number of PDF documents, you can take advantage of these optimizations.
As you create PDFs, you have access to all the capabilities you expect, including:
- adding bookmarks and annotations
- password-protecting the document
- linearing the PDF for fast web delivery
- applying a digital signature
- embedding and subsetting fonts
- setting metadata and things like initial view properties