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Portable Document Format (PDF)
PDF.png

Filename extension .pdf
Internet media type application/pdf

application/x-pdf application/x-bzpdf

application/x-gzpdf
Type code 'PDF ' (including a single space)
Uniform Type Identifier com.adobe.pdf
Magic number %PDF
Developed by Adobe Systems
Initial release 1993 (1993)
Latest release 1.7
Standard(s) ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008[1]
Website Adobe PDF Reference Archives

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a generic computer term.[citation needed] The best-known PDF implementation is Adobe PDF, a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The remainder of this article discusses Adobe PDF exclusively.

Adobe PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.[2] Each Adobe PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents. Lately, 3D drawings can be embedded to PDF documents with Acrobat 3D using U3D or PRC and various other data formats.[3][4]

Adobe Systems co-founder John Warnock outlined a system called "Camelot",[5] that evolved into the Portable Document Format (PDF) file-format.

Formerly a proprietary format, PDF was officially released as an open standard on July 1, 2008, and published by the International Organization for Standardization as ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008.[6][clarification needed]

Contents

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[edit] History

PDF's adoption in the early days of the format's history was slow.[7] Adobe Acrobat, Adobe's suite for reading and creating PDFs, was not freely available; early versions of PDF had no support for external hyperlinks, reducing its usefulness on the Internet; the additional size of the PDF document compared to plain text meant significantly longer download times over the slower modems common at the time, and rendering the files was slow on less powerful machines. Additionally, there were competing formats such as Envoy, Common Ground Digital Paper, Farallon Replica and even Adobe's own PostScript format (.ps); in those early years, the PDF file was mainly popular in desktop publishing workflow. In 1995, AT&T Labs commenced work on another electronic document standard targeted at libraries and archives for preserving their books and documents, DjVu. This standard has evolved into the .djv/ .djvu format, which has had growing success and penetration in the online world for eBooks, catalogs, and image-sharing. DjVu Project

Adobe soon started distributing its Acrobat Reader (now Adobe Reader) program at no cost, and continued supporting the original PDF, which eventually became the de facto standard for printable documents on the web (a standard web document).

The PDF file format has changed several times and continues to evolve, as new versions of Adobe Acrobat were released. There have been nine versions of PDF with corresponding Acrobat releases:[8]

  • (1993) – PDF 1.0 / Acrobat 1.0
  • (1994) – PDF 1.1 / Acrobat 2.0
  • (1996) – PDF 1.2 / Acrobat 3.0
  • (1999) – PDF 1.3 / Acrobat 4.0
  • (2001) – PDF 1.4 / Acrobat 5.0
  • (2003) – PDF 1.5 / Acrobat 6.0
  • (2005) – PDF 1.6 / Acrobat 7.0
  • (2006) – PDF 1.7 / Acrobat 8.0
  • (2008) – PDF 1.7, Adobe Extension Level 3 / Acrobat 9.0
  • (2009) – PDF 1.7, Adobe Extension Level 5 / Acrobat 9.1

The ISO 32000-1:2008 PDF open standard was published by the ISO on July 1, 2008. PDF is now a published ISO standard, titled Document management—Portable document format—Part 1: PDF 1.7

According to the ISO PDF standard abstract:

ISO 32000-1:2008 specifies a digital form for representing electronic documents to enable users to exchange and view electronic documents independent of the environment in which they were created or the environment in which they are viewed or printed. It is intended for the developer of software that creates PDF files (conforming writers), software that reads existing PDF files and interprets their contents for display and interaction (conforming readers) and PDF products that read and/or write PDF files for a variety of other purposes (conforming products).

A new version named "PDF 2.0" is currently under development (ISO/NP 32000-2 - Document management—Portable document format—Part 2: PDF 2.0).[9]

[edit] Technical foundations

Anyone may create applications that can read and write PDF files without having to pay royalties to Adobe Systems; Adobe holds patents to PDF, but licenses them for royalty-free use in developing software complying with its PDF specification.[10]

The PDF combines three technologies:

  • A subset of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the layout and graphics.
  • A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents.
  • A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a single file, with data compression where appropriate.

[edit] PostScript

PostScript is a page description language run in an interpreter to generate an image, a process requiring many resources. PDF is a file format, not a programming language, so that flow control commands such as if and loop are removed, while graphics commands such as lineto remain.

Often, the PostScript-like PDF code is generated from a source PostScript file. The graphics commands that are output by the PostScript code are collected and tokenized; any files, graphics, or fonts to which the document refers also are collected; then, everything is compressed to a single file. Therefore, the entire PostScript world (fonts, layout, measurements) remains intact.

As a document format, PDF has several advantages over PostScript:

  • PDF contains tokenized and interpreted results of the PostScript source code, for direct correspondence between changes to items in the PDF page description and changes to the resulting page appearance.
  • PDF (from version 1.4) supports true graphic transparency; PostScript does not.
  • PostScript is an imperative programming language with an implicit global state, so instructions accompanying the description of one page can affect the appearance of any following page. Therefore, all preceding pages in a PostScript document must be processed in order to determine the correct appearance of a given page, whereas each page in a PDF document is unaffected by the others. As a result, PDF viewers allow the user to quickly jump to the final pages of a long document, whereas a Postscript viewer needs to process all pages sequentially before being able to display the destination page (unless the optional PostScript Document Structuring Conventions have been carefully complied with).

[edit] Technical overview

[edit] File structure

A PDF file consists primarily of objects, of which there are eight types:[11]

  • Boolean values, representing true or false
  • Numbers
  • Strings
  • Names
  • Arrays, ordered collections of objects
  • Dictionaries, collections of objects indexed by Names
  • Streams, usually containing large amounts of data
  • The null object

Objects may be either direct (embedded in another object) or indirect. Indirect objects are numbered with an object number and a generation number. An index table called the xref table gives the byte offset of each indirect object from the start of the file.[12] This design allows for efficient random access to the objects in the file, and also allows for small changes to be made without rewriting the entire file (incremental update). Beginning with PDF version 1.5, indirect objects may also be located in special streams known as object streams. This technique reduces the size of files that have large numbers of small indirect objects and is especially useful for Tagged PDF.

There are two layouts to the PDF files—non-linear (not "optimized") and linear ("optimized"). Non-linear PDF files consume less disk space than their linear counterparts, though they are slower to access because portions of the data required to assemble pages of the document are scattered throughout the PDF file. Linear PDF files (also called "optimized" or "web optimized" PDF files) are constructed in a manner that enables them to be read in a Web browser plugin without waiting for the entire file to download, since they are written to disk in a linear (as in page order) fashion.[13] PDF files may be optimized using Adobe Acrobat software or pdfopt, which is part of GPL Ghostscript.

[edit] Imaging model

The basic design of how graphics are represented in PDF is very similar to that of PostScript, except for the use of transparency, which was added in PDF 1.4.

PDF graphics use a device independent Cartesian coordinate system to describe the surface of a page. A PDF page description can use a matrix to scale, rotate, or skew graphical elements. A key concept in PDF is that of the graphics state, which is a collection of graphical parameters that may be changed, saved, and restored by a page description. PDF has (as of version 1.6) 24 graphics state properties, of which some of the most important are:

[edit] Vector graphics

Vector graphics in PDF, as in PostScript, are constructed with paths. Paths are usually composed of lines and cubic Bézier curves, but can also be constructed from the outlines of text. Unlike PostScript, PDF does not allow a single path to mix text outlines with lines and curves. Paths can be stroked, filled, or used for clipping. Strokes and fills can use any color set in the graphics state, including patterns.

PDF supports several types of patterns. The simplest is the tiling pattern in which a piece of artwork is specified to be drawn repeatedly. This may be a colored tiling pattern, with the colors specified in the pattern object, or an uncolored tiling pattern, which defers color specification to the time the pattern is drawn. Beginning with PDF 1.3 there is also a shading pattern, which draws continuously varying colors. There are seven types of shading pattern of which the simplest are the axial shade (Type 2) and radial shade (Type 3).

[edit] Raster images

Raster images in PDF (called Image XObjects) are represented by dictionaries with an associated stream. The dictionary describes properties of the image, and the stream contains the image data. (Less commonly, a raster image may be embedded directly in a page description as an inline image.) Images are typically filtered for compression purposes. Image filters supported in PDF include the general purpose filters

  • ASCII85Decode a deprecated filter used to put the stream into 7-bit ASCII
  • ASCIIHexDecode similar to ASCII85Decode but less compact
  • FlateDecode a commonly used filter based on the DEFLATE or Zip algorithm
  • LZWDecode a deprecated filter based on LZW Compression
  • RunLengthDecode a simple compression method for streams with repetitive data using the Run-length encoding algorithm

and the image-specific filters

  • DCTDecode a lossy filter based on the JPEG standard
  • CCITTFaxDecode a lossless filter based on the CCITT fax compression standard
  • JBIG2Decode a lossy or lossless filter based on the JBIG2 standard, introduced in PDF 1.4
  • JPXDecode a lossy or lossless filter based on the JPEG 2000 standard, introduced in PDF 1.5

Normally all image content in a PDF is embedded in the file. But PDF allows image data to be stored in external files by the use of external streams or Alternate Images. Standardized subsets of PDF, including PDF/A and PDF/X, prohibit these techniques.

Raster images can be exported using applications such as pdfimages from the xpdf/poppler package[14], or using the "Export All Images" function in the "Advanced" menu of Adobe Acrobat,[15] version 6 or later.[16]

[edit] Text

Text in PDF is represented by text elements in page content streams. A text element specifies that characters should be drawn at certain positions. The characters are specified using the encoding of a selected font resource.

[edit] Fonts

A font object in PDF is a description of a digital typeface. It may either describe the characteristics of a typeface, or it may include an embedded font file. The latter case is called an embedded font while the former is called an unembedded font. The font files that may be embedded are based on widely used standard digital font formats: Type 1 (and its compressed variant CFF), TrueType, and (beginning with PDF 1.6) OpenType. Additionally PDF supports the Type 3 variant in which the components of the font are described by PDF graphic operators.

[edit] Encodings

Within text strings, characters are shown using character codes (integers) that map to glyphs in the current font using an encoding. There are a number of predefined encodings, including WinAnsi, MacRoman, and a large number of encodings for East Asian languages, and a font can have its own built-in encoding. (Although the WinAnsi and MacRoman encodings are derived from the historical properties of the Windows and Macintosh operating systems, fonts using these encodings work equally well on any platform.) PDF can specify a predefined encoding to use, the font's built-in encoding or provide a lookup table of differences to a predefined or built-in encoding(not recommended with TrueType fonts[17]). The encoding mechanisms in PDF were designed for Type 1 fonts, and the rules for applying them to TrueType fonts are complex.

For large fonts or fonts with non-standard glyphs, the special encodings Identity-H (for horizontal writing) and Identity-V (for vertical) are used. With such fonts it is necessary to provide a ToUnicode table if semantic information about the characters is to be preserved.

[edit] Transparency

The original imaging model of PDF was, like PostScript's, opaque: each object drawn on the page completely replaced anything previously marked in the same location. In PDF 1.4 the imaging model was extended to allow transparency. When transparency is used, new objects interact with previously marked objects to produce blending effects. The addition of transparency to PDF was done by means of new extensions that were designed to be ignored in products written to the PDF 1.3 and earlier specifications. As a result, files that use a small amount of transparency might view acceptably in older viewers, but files making extensive use of transparency could view completely wrongly in an older viewer without warning.

The transparency extensions are based on the key concepts of transparency groups, blending modes, shape, and alpha. The model is closely aligned with the features of Adobe Illustrator version 9. The blend modes were based on those used by Adobe Photoshop at the time. When the PDF 1.4 specification was published the formulas for calculating blend modes were kept secret by Adobe. They have since been published.[18]

The concept of a transparency group in PDF specification is independent of existing notions of "group" or "layer" in applications such as Adobe Illustrator. Those groupings reflect logical relationships among objects that are meaningful when editing those objects, but they are not part of the imaging model.

[edit] Interactive elements

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PDF files may contain interactive elements such as annotations and form fields.

Interactive Forms is a mechanism to add forms to the PDF file format.

PDF currently supports two different methods for integrating data and PDF forms. Both formats today coexist in PDF specification:[19][20][21][22][23]

  • AcroForms (also known as Acrobat forms), introduced in the PDF 1.2 format specification and included in all later PDF specifications.
  • Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA) forms, introduced in the PDF 1.5 format specification. The XFA specification is not included in the PDF specification, it is only referenced as an optional feature. Adobe XFA Forms are not compatible with AcroForms.[19][24]

[edit] AcroForms

AcroForms were introduced in the PDF 1.2 format.[25] AcroForms permit using objects (text boxes, radiobuttons, etc.) and some code (JavaScript).

Alongside the standard PDF action types, Interactive forms (AcroForms) support submitting, resetting, and importing data. Submit action transmits the names and values of selected interactive form fields to a specified uniform resource locator (URL). Interactive form field names and values may be submitted in any of the following formats, (depending on the settings of the action’s ExportFormat, SubmitPDF, and XFDF flags):[20]

  • HTML Form format (HTML 4.01 Specification since PDF 1.5; HTML 2.0 since 1.2)
  • Forms Data Format (FDF)
  • XML Forms Data Format (XFDF) (external XML Forms Data Format Specification, Version 2.0; supported since PDF 1.5; it replaced the "XML" form submission format defined in PDF 1.4.)
  • PDF (the entire document can be submitted rather than individual fields and values). (defined in PDF 1.4)

AcroForms can keep form field values in external stand-alone files containing key:value pairs. The external files may use Forms Data Format (FDF) and XML Forms Data Format (XFDF) files.[26][27][28] The usage rights (UR) signatures define rights for import form data files in FDF, XFDF and text (CSV/TSV) formats, and export form data files in FDF and XFDF formats.[20]

[edit] Forms Data Format (FDF)
Forms Data Format (FDF)
Filename extension .fdf
Internet media type application/vnd.fdf[29]
Type code 'FDF '
Developed by Adobe Systems
Initial release 1996 (1996) (PDF 1.2)
Extended from PDF
Extended to XFDF
Standard(s) ISO/IEC 32000-1:2008

The Forms Data Format (FDF) is based on PDF, it uses the same syntax and has essentially the same file structure, but is much simpler than PDF, since the body of an FDF document consists of only one required object. Forms Data Format is defined in PDF format specification (since PDF 1.2). The Forms Data Format can be used when submitting form data to a server, receiving the response, and incorporating into the interactive form. It can also be used to export form data to stand-alone files that can be imported back into the corresponding PDF interactive form. Beginning in PDF 1.3, FDF can be used to define a container for annotations that are separate from the PDF document to which they apply. FDF is typically used to encapsulate information such as X.509 certificates, requests for certificates, directory settings, timestamp server settings, and embedded PDF files for network transmission.[28] The FDF uses the MIME content type application/vnd.fdf, filename extension .fdf and on Mac OS it uses file type 'FDF '.[20] A support for importing and exporting FDF stand-alone files is not widely implemented in free or freeware PDF software. For example, there is no support in Evince, Okular, KPDF or Sumatra PDF. Import support for stand-alone FDF files is implemented in Adobe Reader; export and import support (including saving of FDF data in PDF) is for example implemented in Foxit Reader and PDF-XChange Viewer Free; saving of FDF data in a PDF file is also supported in pdftk.

[edit] XML Forms Data Format (XFDF)
XML Forms Data Format (XFDF)
Filename extension .xfdf
Internet media type application/vnd.adobe.xfdf[30]
Type code 'XFDF'
Developed by Adobe Systems
Latest release 2.0
Extended from PDF, FDF, XML
Website XFDF 2.0 specification

XML Forms Data Format (XFDF) is the XML version of Forms Data Format, but the XFDF implements only a subset of FDF containing forms and annotations. There are not XFDF equivalents for some entries in the FDF dictionary - such as the Status, Encoding, JavaScript, Pages keys, EmbeddedFDFs, Differences and Target. The XFDF specification is referenced (but not included) in PDF 1.5 specification (and in later versions). It is described separately in XML Forms Data Format Specification[27]. The PDF 1.4 specification allowed form submissions in XML format, but this was replaced by submissions in XFDF format in PDF 1.5 specification. XFDF conforms to the XML standard. XFDF can be used the same way as FDF - e.g. form data is submitted to a server, modifications are made, then sent back and the new form data is imported in an interactive form. It can also be used to export form data to stand-alone files that can be imported back into the corresponding PDF interactive form. A support for importing and exporting FDF stand-alone files is not widely implemented in free or freeware PDF software. Import of XFDF is implemented in Adobe Reader 5 and later versions; import and export is implemented in PDF-XChange Viewer Free; embedding of XFDF data in PDF form is implemented in pdftk (pdf toolkit).

[edit] Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA)

In the PDF 1.5 format, Adobe Systems introduced a new, proprietary format for forms, namely Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA) forms. The XFA 2.02 is referenced in the PDF 1.5 specification (and also in later versions) but is described separately in Adobe XML Forms Architecture (XFA) Specification, which has several versions.[25][31] Adobe XFA Forms are not compatible with AcroForms. Creating XFA Forms for use in Adobe Reader requires Adobe LiveCycle Forms Designer.[19][32] Adobe Reader contains "disabled features" for use of XFA Forms, that will activate only when opening a PDF document that was created using enabling technology available only from Adobe.[33][34] The XFA Forms are not compatible with Adobe Reader prior to version 6.[19]

XFA forms can be created and used as PDF files or as XDP (XML Data Package) files. The format of an XFA resource in PDF is described by the XML Data Package Specification.[20] The XDP may be a standalone document or it may in turn be carried inside a PDF document. XDP provides a mechanism for packaging form components within a surrounding XML container. An XDP can also package a PDF file, along with XML form and template data.[31] PDF may contain XFA (in XDP format), but also XFA may contain PDF.[31] When the XFA (XML Forms Architecture) grammars used for an XFA form are moved from one application to another, they must be packaged as an XML Data Package.[35]

When the PDF and XFA are combined, the result is a form in which each page of the XFA form overlays a PDF background. This architecture is sometimes referred to as XFAF (XFA Foreground). The alternative is to express all of the form, including boilerplate, directly in XFA. It is sometimes called full XFA.[35]

Starting with PDF 1.5, the text contents of variable text form fields, as well as markup annotations may include formatting information (style information). These rich text strings are XML documents that conform to the rich text conventions specified for the XML Forms Architecture specification 2.02, which is itself a subset of the XHTML 1.0 specification, augmented with a restricted set of CSS2 style attributes.[20] In PDF 1.6, PDF supports the rich text elements and attributes specified in the XML Forms Architecture (XFA) Specification, 2.2. In PDF 1.7, PDF supports the rich text elements and attributes specified in the XML Forms Architecture (XFA) Specification, 2.4[20]

[edit] Logical structure and accessibility

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A PDF may contain structure information to enable better text extraction and accessibility. When published, PDF/UA, now ISO/AWI 14289, will provide definitive information on how the contents of PDF files are to be tagged with accurate structure information.

[edit] Security and signatures

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A PDF file may be encrypted for security, or digitally signed for authentication.

The standard security provided by Acrobat PDF consists of two different methods and two different passwords, "user password" and "owner password". A PDF document may be protected by password to open ('user' password) and the document may also specify operations that should be restricted even when the document is decrypted: printing; copying text and graphics out of the document; modifying the document; and adding or modifying text notes and AcroForm fields (using 'owner' password). However, all operations (except the document open password protection, if applicable) which are restricted by "owner" or "user" passwords are trivially circumvented by many commonly available "PDF cracking" software and even freely online,[36] and thus these restrictions are obviously ineffective in letting the author control what can and cannot be done with the pdf file he or she created, once it is distributed. This warning is also displayed when applying such restrictions using Adobe Acrobat software to create or edit PDF files.

Even without removing the password, most freeware or open source PDF readers will ignore the digital rights management "protections" and will allow the user to print or make copy of excerpts of the text as if the document where not limited with such anti-features.

[edit] Usage rights

Beginning with PDF 1.5, Usage rights (UR) signatures are used to enable additional interactive features that are not available by default in a particular PDF viewer application. The signature is used to validate that the permissions have been granted by a bonafide granting authority. For example, it can be used to allow a user:[20]

  • to save the PDF document along with modified form and/or annotation data
  • import form data files in FDF, XFDF and text (CSV/TSV) formats
  • export form data files in FDF and XFDF formats
  • submit form data
  • instantiate new pages from named page templates
  • apply a digital signature to existing digital signature form field
  • create, delete, modify, copy, import, export annotations

For example, Adobe Systems grants permissions to enable additional features in Adobe Reader, using public-key cryptography. Adobe Reader will verify that the signature uses a certificate from an Adobe-authorized certificate authority. The PDF 1.5 specification declares that other PDF viewer applications are free to use this same mechanism for their own purposes.[20]

[edit] File attachments

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PDF files can have document-level and page-level file attachments, which the reader can access and open or save to their local filesystem. PDF attachments can be added to existing PDF files for example using pdftk. Adobe Reader provides support for attachments, and poppler based readers like Evince or Okular also have some support for document-level attachments.

[edit] Metadata

PDF files can contain two types of metadata.[37] The first is the Document Information Dictionary, a set of key/value fields such as author, title, subject, creation and update dates. This is stored in the optional Info trailer of the file. A small set of fields is defined, and can be extended with additional text values if required.

Later, in PDF 1.4, support was added for the Metadata Streams, using the Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) to add XML standards-based extensible metadata as used in other file formats. This allows metadata to be attached to any stream in the document, such as information about embedded illustrations, as well as the whole document (attaching to the document catalog), using an extensible schema.

[edit] Subsets

Proper subsets of PDF have been, or are being, standardized under ISO for several constituencies:

  • PDF/X for the printing and graphic arts as ISO 15930 (working in ISO TC130)
  • PDF/A for archiving in corporate/government/library/etc environments as ISO 19005 (work done in ISO TC171)
  • PDF/E for exchange of engineering drawings (work done in ISO TC171)
  • PDF/UA for universally accessible PDF files

A PDF/H variant (PDF for Healthcare) is being developed.[38] However, it may consist more of a set of "best practices" than of a specific format or subset.

[edit] Mars

See also: Page description markup language

Adobe is exploring an XML-based next-generation PDF code named Mars.[39] Information about the Mars file format is published by Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/go/mars and also http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Mars.

The format of graphic elements of Mars is sometimes described simply as "SVG",[citation needed] but according to the version 0.8 draft specification of November 2007 (§3 Mars SVG Support) the format is actually merely similar to SVG: it contains both additions to and subtractions from SVG, so it is in general neither viewable by nor creatable with standard SVG tools: some things will look noticeably different between SVG viewers and Mars viewers.

[edit] Technical issues

[edit] Accessibility

PDF files can be created specifically to be accessible for disabled people.[40][41][42][43][44] Current PDF file formats can include tags (XML), text equivalents, captions, audio descriptions, et cetera. Some software can automatically produce tagged PDFs, however this feature is not always enabled by default. Leading screen readers, including JAWS, Window-Eyes, Hal, and Kurzweil 1000 and 3000 can read tagged PDFs; current versions of the Acrobat and Acrobat Reader programs can also read PDFs aloud.[45][46][47] Moreover, tagged PDFs can be re-flowed and magnified for readers with visual impairments. Problems remain with adding tags to older PDFs and those that are generated from scanned documents. In these cases, accessibility tags and re-flowing are unavailable, and must be created either manually or with OCR techniques. These processes are inaccessible to some disabled people. PDF/UA, the PDF/Universal Accessibility Committee, an activity of AIIM, is working on a specification for PDF accessibility based on ISO 32000.

One of the significant challenges with PDF accessibility is that PDF documents have three distinct views, which, depending on the document's creation, can be inconsistent with each other. The three views are (i) the physical view, (ii) the tags view, and (iii) the content view. The physical view is displayed and printed (what most people consider a PDF document). The tags view is what screen readers read (useful for people with poor eyesight). The content view is displayed when the document is re-flowed to Acrobat (useful for people with mobility disability). For a PDF document to be accessible, the three views must be consistent with each other.[48]

[edit] Security

PDF format attachments carrying viruses were first discovered in 2001. This virus, named "OUTLOOK.PDFWorm" or "Peachy", uses Microsoft Outlook to send itself as an attachment to an Adobe PDF file. It was activated with Adobe Acrobat, but not with Acrobat Reader.[49]

From time to time, new vulnerabilities are discovered[50] in various versions of Adobe Reader, prompting the company to issue security fixes. One aggravating factor is that Adobe Reader is by default integrated into browsers, and can be started automatically if the web page has an embedded PDF file, opening up a new vector of attack. If a malicious web page contains an infected PDF file that takes advantage of some vulnerability in Adobe Reader, the system is compromised even if the browser is up-to-date.

On March 30, 2010 security researcher Didier Stevens reported an "exploit" that causes an arbitrary executable to be run when a PDF file is opened, after the user accepts a warning prompt. The exploit works in several different PDF viewers including Adobe Reader and Foxit Reader.[51]

[edit] Usage restrictions and monitoring

PDFs may be encrypted so that a password is needed to view or edit the contents. The PDF Reference defines both 40-bit and 128-bit encryption, both making use of a complex system of RC4 and MD5. The PDF Reference also defines ways in which third parties can define their own encryption systems for use in PDF.

PDF files may also contain embedded DRM restrictions that provide further controls that limit copying, editing or printing. The restrictions on copying, editing, or printing depend on the reader software to obey them, so the security they provide is limited. Printable documents especially might be saved instead as bitmaps and subject to OCR.

The PDF Reference has technical details or see [52] for an end-user overview. Like HTML files, PDF files may submit information to a web server. This could be used to track the IP address of the client PC, a process kn

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