1 files changed, 33 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/manual/overview.rst b/manual/overview.rst
new file mode 100644
index 00000000..82c7057b
--- /dev/null
+++ b/manual/overview.rst
@@ -0,0 +1,33 @@
+.. _ref.overview:
+
+What is QPDF?
+=============
+
+QPDF is a program and C++ library for structural, content-preserving
+transformations on PDF files. QPDF's website is located at
+https://qpdf.sourceforge.io/. QPDF's source code is hosted on github
+at https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf.
+
+QPDF provides many useful capabilities to developers of PDF-producing
+software or for people who just want to look at the innards of a PDF
+file to learn more about how they work. With QPDF, it is possible to
+copy objects from one PDF file into another and to manipulate the list
+of pages in a PDF file. This makes it possible to merge and split PDF
+files. The QPDF library also makes it possible for you to create PDF
+files from scratch. In this mode, you are responsible for supplying
+all the contents of the file, while the QPDF library takes care of all
+the syntactical representation of the objects, creation of cross
+references tables and, if you use them, object streams, encryption,
+linearization, and other syntactic details. You are still responsible
+for generating PDF content on your own.
+
+QPDF has been designed with very few external dependencies, and it is
+intentionally very lightweight. QPDF is *not* a PDF content creation
+library, a PDF viewer, or a program capable of converting PDF into other
+formats. In particular, QPDF knows nothing about the semantics of PDF
+content streams. If you are looking for something that can do that, you
+should look elsewhere. However, once you have a valid PDF file, QPDF can
+be used to transform that file in ways that perhaps your original PDF
+creation tool can't handle. For example, many programs generate simple PDF
+files but can't password-protect them, web-optimize them, or perform
+other transformations of that type.