PDF knowledge

Find articles that provide you with practical insight into the world of PDFs. Learn all the ins and outs of PDFs, from the fundamentals to the best practices.

Tech corner

Are the PDF/A space requirements a show stopper for archiving?

A PDF/A document requires that all resources such as fonts, color profiles, etc. must be embedded in the file. The archiving of transactional documents can be nightmare because such documents are usually short by nature ...

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Can linearization be combined with digitial signatures and PDF/A conformance?

Linearization is a feature to optimize PDF files for sequential reading. Although it is very useful in web based applications it interferes with other features such as digital signatures.

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Electronic Signatures – A Crash Course

What is a reliable way to digitally sign documents? In this article, we'll explain the differences between electronic signatures and digital signatures, explore the types of signatures used in practice, and discuss the b ...

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The Advantages of PDF/A-3 in Practice

PDF is a widely used digital document format for secure and easy access to documents. The latest version of the format, PDF/A-3, offers the added benefit of being able to store and archive files of any format, including ...

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Does OCR make sense for digitally generated PDFs?

Scanned PDF files usually consist of one raster image for each page. The OCR engine can recognize the text in this image and make the document searchable. But what about digitally generated documents?

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Importing images into a PDF file - a seemingly trivial task

A picture is worth a thousand words. That's why they are fondly embedded in PDF files. One would expect that embedding images in a PDF file is a simple task. Because it seems so easy, there are also many, including free, ...

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How to deal with poor PDF quality

"Quality is remembered long after the price is forgotten", says a Gucci family slogan. Nevertheless, creators of PDF documents, private users up to large companies, regularly produce files with insufficient quality causi ...

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The versatility of a PDF viewer

Almost every user knows: a PDF viewer is not just a display tool for a well known document format. It provides many more functions, runs on many platforms, offers interfaces in many technologies and serves as an importan ...

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The caveats of assembling PDF/A documents

Assembling PDF documents from various sources is a crucial part of an output management system. And, as the document needs to be archived in most cases, it should conform to the PDF/A standard. But, is there a way to ass ...

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Digging for information by extracting data from a PDF document

Extracting text from a PDF document is one of the most popular information retrieval function. But how about other information such as images, metadata and more? It can be simple - but also tricky.

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How to convert signed documents to PDF/A?

I often get the question whether it is possible to convert digitally signed documents to PDF/A. Because there's no short answer to this I thought it would be helpful to explore the topic a bit into more detail. What tec ...

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Image detection in scanned images

Detecting pictures in scanned document pages has many advantages such as better compression rates and the possibility to extract them individually.

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