(v13) PDF

This page applies to Harlequin v13.1r0 and later; both Harlequin Core and Harlequin MultiRIP.

PDF is the file format for Adobe® Acrobat® products. The specification was first published at the same time that the first Acrobat products were introduced in 1993. These products enable users to exchange and view electronic documents independently of the environment in which they were created using the same imaging model as the PostScript® page description language. PDF and the PostScript page description language share the same underlying Adobe imaging model. To improve performance for interactive viewing, PDF defines a more structured format than that used by most PostScript language programs.

PDF files do not encode information specific to the software, hardware, or operating system used to generate or view the document. 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. Each PDF file contains a complete description of a 2D document that includes the text, formats, fonts and images that make up the document.

PDF also serves as a page description language: a language for describing the graphical appearance of pages with respect to an imaging model. A document can easily be converted between PDF and the PostScript language representations, as they produce the same output when printed. Currently, all PDF capable printers also support the PostScript language, but the reverse is not always true.