A Peek at What is Inside
I said that PostScript, Adobe’s page description language, became one of the foundations of the portable document format. That’s true, as far as it goes; however PDF files don’t contain actual PostScript code. Instead, PDF files contain instructions for drawing pages that are PostScript-like instructions, but simplified and designed for efficient processing. These PostScript-like instructions manipulate the objects that are displayed on the page, which roughly fall into three types:
Graphic path objects: These objects contain information about the lines, rectangles, and curves on a page, and how they are to be placed, drawn, and filled.
PDF image objects: You can also think of these as raster images—a stream of pixels, in ...
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