PDF

The Portable Document Format developed by Adobe - essentially Encapsulated PostScript with a few indexing,crypto and security features thrown in.

Resources

Date	Link	Notes
2026-06-20 00:00:00 +0000 UTC	make-look-scanned	a CLI and browser/WASM tool that degrades PDFs to mimic physical scans, adding skew, grain, blur, shadows, and compression artifacts
2026-03-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC	markdown-to-pdf	Markdown-to-PDF pipeline implemented in TypeScript so you can render PDFs without spinning up a browser.
2026-02-28 00:00:00 +0000 UTC	vmprint	A pure-JS, zero-dependency typesetting engine that renders bit-perfect PDFs across any runtime without needing Headless Chrome.
2025-12-26 00:00:00 +0000 UTC	OCRmyPDF	adds an OCR text layer to scanned PDFs.
2024-11-24 00:00:00 +0000 UTC	PDFify	A Mac app to create searchable PDFs with OCR support.
2006-05-02 00:00:00 +0000 UTC	Tabbloid	An interesting service that takes RSS feeds and e-mails you a PDF magazine.
2005-01-01 00:00:00 +0000 UTC	Multivalent PDF Tools	written in Java
	PDF Creator
	Foxit PDF Viewer	very fast, very small, somewhat buggy image display and font rendering. Lets you remove all toolbars, advertising, etc.
	RedMon	The ancient Windows print redirector
	CutePDF	works properly under Terminal Services, Citrix, etc. (my current choice)
	FPDF	a PHP class to generate PDFs (Ruby port)
	Primo PDF	doesn’t work properly under Terminal Services for some reason
	PrinceXML	converts XHTML into hyperlinked PDF documents
	PDFTools	for Windows, allows for combining and manipulating multiple files.
	Ghostscript	The one that started it all

Mac OS X uses Display PostScript (part of its NeXT heritage), so you don’t need anything to view or create PDFs in it (just save the Print Preview results to a file).

Samba Ghostscript Printer

[smbpdf]
  comment = PDF Generator
  path = /var/spool/samba
  printable = Yes
  print command = gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -q - \
  sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=%H/%s.pdf; rm %s

Compression

Here’s a plugin for PDF compression that I used under Leopard, but you can just do:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH –sOutputFile=file-out.pdf file-in.pdf

#…or:
gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dColorConversionStrategy=/Gray -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=file-out.pdf file-in.pdf

Simulating a Scanned Image

#!/bin/sh
ROTATION=$(shuf -n 1 -e ‘-‘ ‘’)$(shuf -n 1 -e $(seq 0.05 .5))

convert -density 150 $1 \
  -linear-stretch ‘1.5%x2%’ \
  -rotate ${ROTATION} \
  -attenuate ‘0.01’ \
  +noise  Multiplicative \
  -colorspace ‘gray’ $2

Editing PDFs

I’ve found that LibreOffice Writer has the ability to edit PDFs in-line to some degree (thanks to its integration with Draw). It will not preserve font names or styles, though.

Affinitiy Designer, however, can do so much better (although it will not deal with embedded fonts)

Removing Metadata

You can tweak or remove document metadata by using a pdfmarks file with Ghostscript:

[ /Title (Document title)
  /Author (Author name)
  /Subject (Subject description)
  /Keywords (comma, separated, keywords)
  /ModDate (D:20061204092842)
  /CreationDate (D:20061204092842)
  /Creator (application name or creator note)
  /Producer (PDF producer name or note)
  /DOCINFO pdfmark

…and combining it like this:

gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=output.pdf original.pdf pdfmarks

Removing Passwords

The qpdf utility (some assembly required) can do it cleanly like so:

qpdf —password=foobar —decrypt orig.pdf new.pdf

Tao of Mac