1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
182
183
184
185
186
187
188
189
190
191
192
193
194
195
196
197
198
199
200
201
202
203
204
205
206
207
208
209
210
211
212
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
235
236
237
238
239
240
241
242
243
244
245
246
247
248
249
250
251
252
253
254
255
256
257
258
259
260
261
262
263
264
265
266
267
268
269
270
271
272
273
274
275
276
277
278
279
280
281
282
283
284
285
286
287
288
289
290
291
292
293
294
295
296
297
298
299
300
301
302
303
304
305
306
307
308
309
310
311
312
313
314
315
316
317
318
319
320
321
322
323
324
325
326
327
328
329
330
331
332
333
334
335
336
337
338
339
340
341
342
343
344
345
346
347
348
349
350
351
352
353
354
355
356
357
358
359
360
361
362
363
364
365
366
367
368
369
370
371
372
373
374
375
376
377
378
379
380
381
382
383
384
385
386
387
388
389
390
391
392
393
394
395
396
397
398
399
400
401
402
403
404
405
406
407
408
409
410
411
412
413
414
415
416
417
418
419
420
421
422
423
424
425
426
427
428
429
430
431
432
433
434
435
436
437
438
439
440
441
442
443
444
445
446
447
448
449
450
451
452
453
454
455
456
457
458
459
460
461
462
463
464
465
466
467
468
469
470
471
472
473
474
475
476
477
478
479
480
481
482
483
484
485
486
487
488
489
490
491
492
493
494
495
496
497
498
499
500
501
502
503
504
505
506
507
508
509
510
511
512
513
514
515
516
517
518
519
520
521
522
523
524
525
526
527
528
529
530
531
532
533
534
535
536
537
538
539
540
541
542
543
544
545
546
547
548
549
550
551
552
553
554
555
556
557
558
559
560
561
562
563
564
565
566
567
568
569
570
571
572
573
574
575
576
577
578
579
580
581
582
583
584
585
586
587
588
589
590
591
592
593
594
595
596
597
598
599
600
601
602
603
604
605
606
607
608
609
610
611
612
613
614
615
616
617
618
619
620
621
622
623
624
625
626
627
628
629
630
631
632
633
634
635
636
637
638
639
640
641
642
643
644
645
646
647
648
649
650
651
652
653
654
655
656
657
658
659
660
661
662
663
664
665
666
667
668
669
670
671
672
673
674
675
676
677
678
679
680
681
682
683
684
685
686
687
688
689
690
691
692
693
694
695
696
697
698
699
700
701
702
703
704
705
706
707
708
709
710
711
712
713
714
715
716
717
718
719
720
721
722
723
724
725
726
727
728
729
730
731
732
733
734
735
736
737
738
739
740
741
742
743
744
745
746
747
748
749
750
751
752
753
754
755
756
757
758
759
760
761
762
763
764
765
766
767
768
769
770
771
772
773
774
775
776
777
778
779
780
781
782
783
784
785
786
787
788
789
790
791
792
793
794
795
796
797
798
799
800
801
802
803
804
805
806
807
808
809
810
811
812
813
814
815
816
817
818
819
820
821
822
823
824
825
826
827
828
829
830
831
832
833
834
835
836
837
838
839
840
841
842
843
844
845
846
847
848
849
850
851
852
853
854
855
856
857
858
859
860
861
862
863
864
865
866
867
868
869
870
871
872
873
874
875
876
877
878
879
880
881
882
883
884
885
886
887
888
889
890
891
892
893
894
895
896
897
898
899
900
901
902
903
904
905
906
907
908
909
910
911
912
913
914
915
916
917
918
919
920
921
922
923
924
925
926
927
928
929
930
931
932
933
934
935
936
937
938
939
940
941
942
943
944
945
946
947
948
949
950
951
952
953
954
955
956
957
958
959
960
961
962
963
964
965
966
967
968
969
970
971
972
973
974
975
976
977
978
979
980
981
982
983
984
985
986
987
988
989
990
991
992
993
994
995
996
997
998
999
1000
1001
1002
1003
1004
1005
1006
1007
1008
1009
1010
1011
1012
1013
1014
1015
1016
1017
1018
1019
1020
1021
1022
1023
1024
1025
1026
1027
1028
1029
1030
1031
1032
1033
1034
1035
1036
1037
1038
1039
1040
1041
1042
1043
1044
1045
1046
1047
1048
1049
1050
1051
1052
1053
1054
1055
1056
1057
1058
1059
1060
1061
1062
1063
1064
1065
1066
1067
1068
1069
1070
1071
1072
1073
1074
1075
1076
1077
1078
1079
1080
1081
1082
1083
1084
1085
1086
1087
1088
1089
1090
1091
1092
1093
1094
1095
1096
1097
1098
1099
1100
1101
1102
1103
1104
1105
1106
1107
1108
1109
1110
1111
1112
1113
1114
1115
1116
1117
1118
1119
1120
1121
1122
1123
1124
1125
1126
1127
1128
1129
1130
1131
1132
1133
1134
1135
1136
1137
1138
1139
1140
1141
1142
1143
1144
1145
1146
1147
1148
1149
1150
1151
1152
1153
1154
1155
1156
1157
1158
1159
1160
1161
1162
1163
1164
1165
1166
1167
1168
1169
1170
1171
1172
1173
1174
1175
1176
1177
1178
1179
1180
1181
1182
1183
1184
1185
1186
1187
1188
1189
1190
1191
1192
1193
1194
1195
1196
1197
1198
1199
1200
1201
1202
1203
1204
1205
1206
1207
1208
1209
1210
1211
1212
1213
1214
1215
1216
1217
1218
1219
1220
1221
1222
1223
1224
1225
1226
1227
1228
1229
1230
1231
1232
1233
1234
1235
1236
1237
1238
1239
1240
1241
1242
1243
1244
1245
1246
1247
1248
1249
1250
1251
1252
1253
1254
1255
1256
1257
1258
1259
1260
1261
1262
1263
1264
1265
1266
1267
1268
1269
1270
1271
1272
1273
1274
1275
1276
1277
1278
1279
1280
1281
1282
1283
1284
1285
1286
1287
1288
1289
1290
1291
1292
1293
1294
1295
1296
1297
1298
1299
1300
1301
1302
1303
1304
1305
1306
1307
1308
1309
1310
1311
1312
1313
1314
1315
1316
1317
1318
1319
1320
1321
1322
1323
1324
1325
1326
1327
1328
1329
1330
1331
1332
1333
1334
1335
1336
1337
1338
1339
1340
1341
1342
1343
1344
1345
1346
1347
1348
1349
1350
1351
1352
1353
1354
1355
1356
1357
1358
1359
1360
1361
1362
1363
1364
1365
1366
1367
1368
1369
1370
1371
1372
1373
1374
1375
1376
1377
1378
1379
1380
1381
1382
1383
1384
1385
1386
1387
1388
1389
1390
1391
1392
1393
1394
1395
1396
1397
1398
1399
1400
1401
1402
1403
1404
1405
1406
1407
1408
1409
1410
1411
1412
1413
1414
1415
1416
1417
1418
1419
1420
1421
1422
1423
1424
1425
1426
1427
1428
1429
1430
1431
1432
1433
1434
1435
1436
1437
1438
1439
1440
1441
1442
1443
1444
1445
1446
1447
1448
1449
1450
1451
1452
1453
1454
1455
1456
1457
1458
1459
1460
1461
1462
1463
1464
1465
1466
1467
1468
1469
1470
1471
1472
1473
1474
1475
1476
1477
1478
1479
1480
1481
1482
1483
1484
1485
1486
1487
1488
1489
1490
1491
1492
1493
1494
1495
1496
1497
1498
1499
1500
1501
1502
1503
1504
1505
1506
1507
1508
1509
1510
1511
1512
1513
1514
1515
1516
1517
1518
1519
1520
1521
1522
1523
1524
1525
1526
1527
1528
1529
1530
1531
1532
1533
1534
1535
1536
1537
1538
1539
1540
1541
1542
1543
1544
1545
1546
1547
1548
1549
1550
1551
1552
1553
1554
1555
1556
1557
1558
1559
1560
1561
1562
1563
1564
1565
1566
1567
1568
1569
1570
1571
1572
1573
1574
1575
1576
1577
1578
1579
1580
1581
1582
1583
1584
1585
1586
1587
1588
1589
1590
1591
1592
1593
1594
1595
1596
1597
1598
1599
1600
1601
1602
1603
1604
1605
1606
1607
1608
1609
1610
1611
1612
1613
1614
1615
1616
1617
1618
1619
1620
1621
1622
1623
1624
1625
1626
1627
1628
1629
1630
1631
1632
1633
1634
1635
1636
1637
1638
1639
1640
1641
1642
1643
1644
1645
1646
1647
1648
1649
1650
1651
1652
1653
1654
1655
1656
1657
1658
1659
1660
1661
1662
1663
1664
1665
1666
1667
1668
1669
1670
1671
1672
1673
1674
1675
1676
1677
1678
1679
1680
1681
1682
1683
1684
1685
1686
1687
1688
1689
1690
1691
1692
1693
1694
1695
1696
1697
1698
1699
1700
1701
1702
1703
1704
1705
1706
1707
1708
1709
1710
1711
1712
1713
1714
1715
1716
1717
1718
1719
1720
1721
1722
1723
1724
1725
1726
1727
1728
1729
1730
1731
1732
1733
1734
1735
1736
1737
1738
1739
1740
1741
1742
1743
1744
1745
1746
1747
1748
1749
1750
1751
1752
1753
1754
1755
1756
1757
1758
1759
1760
1761
1762
1763
1764
1765
1766
1767
1768
1769
1770
1771
1772
1773
1774
1775
1776
1777
1778
1779
1780
1781
1782
1783
1784
1785
1786
1787
1788
1789
1790
1791
1792
1793
1794
1795
1796
1797
1798
1799
1800
1801
1802
1803
1804
1805
1806
1807
1808
1809
1810
1811
1812
1813
1814
1815
1816
1817
1818
1819
1820
1821
1822
1823
1824
1825
1826
1827
1828
1829
1830
1831
1832
1833
1834
1835
1836
1837
1838
1839
1840
1841
1842
1843
1844
1845
1846
1847
1848
1849
1850
1851
1852
1853
1854
1855
1856
1857
1858
1859
1860
1861
1862
1863
1864
1865
1866
1867
1868
1869
1870
1871
1872
1873
1874
1875
1876
1877
1878
1879
1880
1881
1882
1883
1884
1885
1886
1887
1888
1889
1890
1891
1892
1893
1894
1895
1896
1897
1898
1899
1900
1901
1902
1903
1904
1905
1906
1907
1908
1909
1910
1911
1912
1913
1914
1915
1916
1917
1918
1919
1920
1921
1922
1923
1924
1925
1926
1927
1928
1929
1930
1931
1932
1933
1934
1935
1936
1937
1938
1939
1940
1941
1942
1943
1944
1945
1946
1947
1948
1949
1950
1951
1952
1953
1954
1955
1956
1957
1958
1959
1960
1961
1962
1963
1964
1965
1966
1967
1968
1969
1970
1971
1972
1973
1974
1975
1976
1977
1978
1979
1980
1981
1982
1983
1984
1985
1986
1987
1988
1989
1990
1991
1992
1993
1994
1995
1996
1997
1998
1999
2000
2001
2002
2003
2004
2005
2006
2007
2008
2009
2010
2011
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
2017
2018
2019
2020
2021
2022
2023
2024
2025
2026
2027
2028
2029
2030
2031
2032
2033
2034
2035
2036
2037
2038
2039
2040
2041
2042
2043
2044
2045
2046
2047
2048
2049
2050
2051
2052
2053
2054
2055
2056
2057
2058
2059
2060
2061
2062
2063
2064
2065
2066
2067
2068
2069
2070
2071
2072
2073
2074
2075
2076
2077
2078
2079
2080
2081
2082
2083
2084
2085
2086
2087
2088
2089
2090
2091
2092
2093
2094
2095
2096
2097
2098
2099
2100
2101
2102
2103
2104
2105
2106
2107
2108
2109
2110
2111
2112
2113
2114
2115
2116
2117
2118
2119
2120
2121
2122
2123
2124
2125
2126
2127
2128
2129
2130
2131
2132
2133
2134
2135
2136
2137
2138
2139
2140
2141
2142
2143
2144
2145
2146
2147
2148
2149
2150
2151
2152
2153
2154
2155
2156
2157
2158
2159
2160
2161
2162
2163
2164
2165
2166
2167
2168
2169
2170
2171
2172
2173
2174
2175
2176
2177
2178
2179
2180
2181
2182
2183
2184
2185
2186
2187
2188
2189
2190
2191
2192
2193
2194
2195
2196
2197
2198
2199
2200
2201
2202
2203
2204
2205
2206
2207
2208
2209
2210
2211
2212
2213
2214
2215
2216
2217
2218
2219
2220
2221
2222
2223
2224
2225
2226
2227
2228
2229
2230
2231
2232
2233
2234
2235
2236
2237
2238
2239
2240
2241
2242
2243
2244
2245
2246
2247
2248
2249
2250
2251
2252
2253
2254
2255
2256
2257
2258
2259
2260
2261
2262
2263
2264
2265
2266
2267
2268
2269
2270
2271
2272
2273
2274
2275
2276
2277
2278
2279
2280
2281
2282
2283
2284
2285
2286
2287
2288
2289
2290
2291
2292
2293
2294
2295
2296
2297
2298
2299
2300
2301
2302
2303
2304
2305
2306
2307
2308
2309
2310
2311
2312
2313
2314
2315
2316
2317
2318
2319
2320
2321
2322
2323
2324
2325
2326
2327
2328
2329
2330
2331
2332
2333
2334
2335
2336
2337
2338
2339
2340
2341
2342
2343
2344
2345
2346
2347
2348
2349
2350
2351
2352
2353
2354
2355
2356
2357
2358
2359
2360
2361
2362
2363
2364
2365
2366
2367
2368
2369
2370
2371
2372
2373
2374
2375
2376
2377
2378
2379
2380
2381
2382
2383
2384
2385
2386
2387
2388
2389
2390
2391
2392
2393
2394
2395
2396
2397
2398
2399
2400
2401
2402
2403
2404
2405
2406
2407
2408
2409
2410
2411
2412
2413
2414
2415
2416
2417
2418
2419
2420
2421
2422
2423
2424
2425
2426
2427
2428
2429
2430
2431
2432
2433
2434
2435
2436
2437
2438
2439
2440
2441
2442
2443
2444
2445
2446
2447
2448
2449
2450
2451
2452
2453
2454
2455
2456
2457
2458
2459
2460
2461
2462
2463
2464
2465
2466
2467
2468
2469
2470
2471
2472
2473
2474
2475
2476
2477
2478
2479
2480
2481
2482
2483
2484
2485
2486
2487
2488
2489
2490
2491
2492
2493
2494
2495
2496
2497
2498
2499
2500
2501
2502
2503
2504
2505
2506
2507
2508
2509
2510
2511
2512
2513
2514
2515
2516
2517
2518
2519
2520
2521
2522
2523
2524
2525
2526
2527
2528
2529
2530
2531
2532
2533
2534
2535
2536
2537
2538
2539
2540
2541
2542
2543
2544
2545
2546
2547
2548
2549
2550
2551
2552
2553
2554
2555
2556
2557
2558
2559
2560
2561
2562
2563
2564
2565
2566
2567
2568
2569
2570
2571
2572
2573
2574
2575
2576
2577
2578
2579
2580
2581
2582
2583
2584
2585
2586
2587
2588
2589
2590
2591
2592
2593
2594
2595
2596
2597
2598
2599
2600
2601
2602
2603
2604
2605
2606
2607
2608
2609
2610
2611
2612
2613
2614
2615
2616
2617
2618
2619
2620
2621
2622
2623
2624
2625
2626
2627
2628
2629
2630
2631
2632
2633
2634
2635
2636
2637
2638
2639
2640
2641
2642
2643
2644
2645
2646
2647
2648
2649
2650
2651
2652
2653
2654
2655
2656
2657
2658
2659
2660
2661
2662
2663
2664
2665
2666
2667
2668
2669
2670
2671
2672
2673
2674
2675
2676
2677
2678
2679
2680
2681
2682
2683
2684
2685
2686
2687
2688
2689
2690
2691
2692
2693
2694
2695
2696
2697
2698
2699
2700
2701
2702
2703
2704
2705
2706
2707
2708
2709
2710
2711
2712
2713
2714
2715
2716
2717
2718
2719
2720
2721
2722
2723
2724
2725
2726
2727
2728
2729
2730
2731
2732
2733
2734
2735
2736
2737
2738
2739
2740
2741
2742
2743
2744
2745
2746
2747
2748
2749
2750
2751
2752
2753
2754
2755
2756
2757
2758
2759
2760
2761
2762
2763
2764
2765
2766
2767
2768
2769
2770
2771
2772
2773
2774
2775
2776
2777
2778
2779
2780
2781
2782
2783
2784
2785
2786
2787
2788
2789
2790
2791
2792
2793
2794
2795
2796
2797
2798
2799
2800
2801
2802
2803
2804
2805
2806
2807
2808
2809
2810
2811
2812
2813
2814
2815
2816
2817
2818
2819
2820
2821
2822
2823
2824
2825
2826
2827
2828
2829
2830
2831
2832
2833
2834
2835
2836
2837
2838
2839
2840
2841
2842
2843
2844
2845
2846
2847
2848
2849
2850
2851
2852
2853
2854
2855
2856
2857
2858
2859
2860
2861
2862
2863
2864
2865
2866
2867
2868
2869
2870
2871
2872
2873
2874
2875
2876
2877
2878
2879
2880
2881
2882
2883
2884
2885
2886
2887
2888
2889
2890
2891
2892
2893
2894
2895
2896
2897
2898
2899
2900
2901
2902
2903
2904
2905
2906
2907
2908
2909
2910
2911
2912
2913
2914
2915
2916
2917
2918
2919
2920
2921
2922
2923
2924
2925
2926
2927
2928
2929
2930
2931
2932
2933
2934
2935
2936
2937
2938
2939
2940
2941
2942
2943
2944
2945
2946
2947
2948
2949
2950
2951
2952
2953
2954
2955
2956
2957
2958
2959
2960
2961
2962
2963
2964
2965
2966
2967
2968
2969
2970
2971
2972
2973
2974
2975
2976
2977
2978
2979
2980
2981
2982
2983
2984
2985
2986
2987
2988
2989
2990
2991
2992
2993
2994
2995
2996
2997
2998
2999
3000
3001
3002
3003
3004
3005
3006
3007
3008
3009
3010
3011
3012
3013
3014
3015
3016
3017
3018
3019
3020
3021
3022
3023
3024
3025
3026
3027
3028
3029
3030
3031
3032
3033
3034
3035
3036
3037
3038
3039
3040
3041
3042
3043
3044
3045
3046
3047
3048
3049
3050
3051
3052
3053
3054
3055
3056
3057
3058
3059
3060
3061
3062
3063
3064
3065
3066
3067
3068
3069
3070
3071
3072
3073
3074
3075
3076
3077
3078
3079
3080
3081
3082
3083
3084
3085
3086
3087
3088
3089
3090
3091
3092
3093
3094
3095
3096
3097
3098
3099
3100
3101
3102
3103
3104
3105
3106
3107
3108
3109
3110
3111
3112
3113
3114
3115
3116
3117
3118
3119
3120
3121
3122
3123
3124
3125
3126
3127
3128
3129
3130
3131
3132
3133
3134
3135
3136
3137
3138
3139
3140
3141
3142
3143
3144
3145
3146
3147
3148
3149
3150
3151
3152
3153
3154
3155
3156
3157
3158
3159
3160
3161
3162
3163
3164
3165
3166
3167
3168
3169
3170
3171
3172
3173
3174
3175
3176
3177
3178
3179
3180
3181
3182
3183
3184
3185
3186
3187
3188
3189
3190
3191
3192
3193
3194
3195
3196
3197
3198
3199
3200
3201
3202
3203
3204
3205
3206
3207
3208
3209
3210
3211
3212
3213
3214
3215
3216
3217
3218
3219
3220
3221
3222
3223
3224
3225
3226
3227
3228
3229
3230
3231
3232
3233
3234
3235
3236
3237
3238
3239
3240
3241
3242
3243
3244
3245
3246
3247
3248
3249
3250
3251
3252
3253
3254
3255
3256
3257
3258
3259
3260
3261
3262
3263
3264
3265
3266
3267
3268
3269
3270
3271
3272
3273
3274
3275
3276
3277
|
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE book [
<!ENTITY ldquo "“">
<!ENTITY rdquo "”">
<!ENTITY mdash "—">
<!ENTITY ndash "–">
<!ENTITY nbsp " ">
<!ENTITY swversion "3.0.2">
<!ENTITY lastreleased "September 6, 2012">
]>
<book>
<bookinfo>
<title>QPDF Manual</title>
<subtitle>For QPDF Version &swversion;, &lastreleased;</subtitle>
<author>
<firstname>Jay</firstname><surname>Berkenbilt</surname>
</author>
<copyright>
<year>2005–2012</year>
<holder>Jay Berkenbilt</holder>
</copyright>
</bookinfo>
<preface id="acknowledgments">
<title>General Information</title>
<para>
QPDF is a program that does structural, content-preserving
transformations on PDF files. QPDF's website is located at <ulink
url="http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/">http://qpdf.sourceforge.net/</ulink>.
QPDF's source code is hosted on github at <ulink
url="https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf">https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf</ulink>.
</para>
<para>
QPDF has been released under the terms of <ulink
url="http://www.opensource.org/licenses/artistic-license-2.0.php">Version
2.0 of the Artistic License</ulink>, a copy of which appears in the
file <filename>Artistic-2.0</filename> in the source distribution.
</para>
<para>
QPDF was originally created in 2001 and modified periodically
between 2001 and 2005 during my employment at <ulink
url="http://www.apexcovantage.com">Apex CoVantage</ulink>. Upon my
departure from Apex, the company graciously allowed me to take
ownership of the software and continue maintaining as an open
source project, a decision for which I am very grateful. I have
made considerable enhancements to it since that time. I feel
fortunate to have worked for people who would make such a decision.
This work would not have been possible without their support.
</para>
</preface>
<chapter id="ref.overview">
<title>What is QPDF?</title>
<para>
QPDF is a program that does structural, content-preserving
transformations on PDF files. It could have been called something
like <emphasis>pdf-to-pdf</emphasis>. It also 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.
</para>
<para>
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 off 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.
</para>
<para>
QPDF has been designed with very few external dependencies, and it
is intentionally very lightweight. QPDF is
<emphasis>not</emphasis> 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 perhaps
your original PDF creation 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.
</para>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.installing">
<title>Building and Installing QPDF</title>
<para>
This chapter describes how to build and install qpdf. Please see
also the <filename>README</filename> and
<filename>INSTALL</filename> files in the source distribution.
</para>
<sect1 id="ref.prerequisites">
<title>System Requirements</title>
<para>
The qpdf package has relatively few external dependencies. In
order to build qpdf, the following packages are required:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
zlib: <ulink url="http://www.zlib.net/">http://www.zlib.net/</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
pcre: <ulink url="http://www.pcre.org/">http://www.pcre.org/</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
gnu make 3.81 or newer: <ulink url="http://www.gnu.org/software/make">http://www.gnu.org/software/make</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
perl version 5.8 or newer:
<ulink url="http://www.perl.org/">http://www.perl.org/</ulink>;
required for <command>fix-qdf</command> and the test suite.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
GNU diffutils (any version): <ulink
url="http://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/">http://www.gnu.org/software/diffutils/</ulink>
is required to run the test suite. Note that this is the
version of diff present on virtually all GNU/Linux systems.
This is required because the test suite uses <command>diff
-u</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A C++ compiler that works well with STL and has the <type>long
long</type> type. Most modern C++ compilers should fit the
bill fine. QPDF is tested with gcc and Microsoft Visual C++.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Part of qpdf's test suite does comparisons of the contents PDF
files by converting them images and comparing the images. The
image comparison tests are disabled by default. Those tests are
not required for determining correctness of a qpdf build if you
have not modified the code since the test suite also contains
expected output files that are compared literally. The image
comparison tests provide an extra check to make sure that any
content transformations don't break the rendering of pages.
Transformations that affect the content streams themselves are off
by default and are only provided to help developers look into the
contents of PDF files. If you are making deep changes to the
library that cause changes in the contents of the files that qpdf
generates, then you should enable the image comparison tests.
Enable them by running <command>configure</command> with the
<option>--enable-test-compare-images</option> flag. If you enable
this, the following additional requirements are required by the
test suite. Note that in no case are these items required to use
qpdf.
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
libtiff: <ulink url="http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/">http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
GhostScript version 8.60 or newer: <ulink
url="http://www.ghostscript.com">http://www.ghostscript.com</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
If you do not enable this, then you do not need to have tiff and
ghostscript.
</para>
<para>
If Adobe Reader is installed as <command>acroread</command>, some
additional test cases will be enabled. These test cases simply
verify that Adobe Reader can open the files that qpdf creates.
They require version 8.0 or newer to pass. However, in order to
avoid having qpdf depend on non-free (as in liberty) software, the
test suite will still pass without Adobe reader, and the test
suite still exercises the full functionality of the software.
</para>
<para>
Pre-built documentation is distributed with qpdf, so you should
generally not need to rebuild the documentation. In order to
build the documentation from its docbook sources, you need the
docbook XML style sheets (<ulink
url="http://downloads.sourceforge.net/docbook/">http://downloads.sourceforge.net/docbook/</ulink>).
To build the PDF version of the documentation, you need Apache fop
(<ulink
url="http://xml.apache.org/fop/">http://xml.apache.org/fop/</ulink>)
version 0.94 or higher.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.building">
<title>Build Instructions</title>
<para>
Building qpdf on UNIX is generally just a matter of running
<programlisting>./configure
make
</programlisting>
You can also run <command>make check</command> to run the test
suite and <command>make install</command> to install. Please run
<command>./configure --help</command> for options on what can be
configured. You can also set the value of
<varname>DESTDIR</varname> during installation to install to a
temporary location, as is common with many open source packages.
Please see also the <filename>README</filename> and
<filename>INSTALL</filename> files in the source distribution.
</para>
<para>
Building on Windows is a little bit more complicated. For
details, please see <filename>README-windows.txt</filename> in the
source distribution. You can also download a binary distribution
for Windows. There is a port of qpdf to Visual C++ version 6 in
the <filename>contrib</filename> area generously contributed by
Jian Ma. This is also discussed in more detail in
<filename>README-windows.txt</filename>.
</para>
<para>
There are some other things you can do with the build. Although
qpdf uses <application>autoconf</application>, it does not use
<application>automake</application> but instead uses a
hand-crafted non-recursive Makefile that requires gnu make. If
you're really interested, please read the comments in the
top-level <filename>Makefile</filename>.
</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.using">
<title>Running QPDF</title>
<para>
This chapter describes how to run the qpdf program from the command
line.
</para>
<sect1 id="ref.invocation">
<title>Basic Invocation</title>
<para>
When running qpdf, the basic invocation is as follows:
<programlisting><command>qpdf</command><option> [ <replaceable>options</replaceable> ] <replaceable>infilename</replaceable> [ <replaceable>outfilename</replaceable> ]</option>
</programlisting>
This converts PDF file <option>infilename</option> to PDF file
<option>outfilename</option>. The output file is functionally
identical to the input file but may have been structurally
reorganized. Also, orphaned objects will be removed from the
file. Many transformations are available as controlled by the
options below. In place of <option>infilename</option>, the
parameter <option>--empty</option> may be specified. This causes
qpdf to use a dummy input file that contains zero pages. The only
normal use case for using <option>--empty</option> would be if you
were going to add pages from another source, as discussed in <xref
linkend="ref.page-selection"/>.
</para>
<para>
<option>outfilename</option> does not have to be seekable, even
when generating linearized files. Specifying
“<option>-</option>” as <option>outfilename</option>
means to write to standard output. However, you can't specify the
same file as both the input and the output because qpdf reads data
from the input file as it writes to the output file.
</para>
<para>
Most options require an output file, but some testing or
inspection commands do not. These are specifically noted.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.basic-options">
<title>Basic Options</title>
<para>
The following options are the most common ones and perform
commonly needed transformations.
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--password=password</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Specifies a password for accessing encrypted files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--linearize</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Causes generation of a linearized (web-optimized) output file.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--copy-encryption=file</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Encrypt the file using the same encryption parameters,
including user and owner password, as the specified file. Use
<option>--encrypt-file-password</option> to specify a password
if one is needed to open this file. Note that copying the
encryption parameters from a file also copies the first half
of <literal>/ID</literal> from the file since this is part of
the encryption parameters.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--encrypt-file-password=password</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If the file specified with <option>--copy-encryption</option>
requires a password, specify the password using this option.
Note that only one of the user or owner password is required.
Both passwords will be preserved since QPDF does not
distinguish between the two passwords. It is possible to
preserve encryption parameters, including the owner password,
from a file even if you don't know the file's owner password.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--encrypt options --</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Causes generation an encrypted output file. Please see <xref
linkend="ref.encryption-options"/> for details on how to
specify encryption parameters.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--decrypt</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Removes any encryption on the file. A password must be
supplied if the file is password protected.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--pages options --</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Select specific pages from one or more input files. See <xref
linkend="ref.page-selection"/> for details on how to do page
selection (splitting and merging).
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
<para>
Password-protected files may be opened by specifying a password.
By default, qpdf will preserve any encryption data associated with
a file. If <option>--decrypt</option> is specified, qpdf will
attempt to remove any encryption information. If
<option>--encrypt</option> is specified, qpdf will replace the
document's encryption parameters with whatever is specified.
</para>
<para>
Note that qpdf does not obey encryption restrictions already
imposed on the file. Doing so would be meaningless since qpdf can
be used to remove encryption from the file entirely. This
functionality is not intended to be used for bypassing copyright
restrictions or other restrictions placed on files by their
producers.
</para>
<para>
In all cases where qpdf allows specification of a password, care
must be taken if the password contains characters that fall
outside of the 7-bit US-ASCII character range to ensure that the
exact correct byte sequence is provided. It is possible that a
future version of qpdf may handle this more gracefully. For
example, if a password was encrypted using a password that was
encoded in ISO-8859-1 and your terminal is configured to use
UTF-8, the password you supply may not work properly. There are
various approaches to handling this. For example, if you are
using Linux and have the iconv executable (part of the ICU
package) installed, you could pass <option>--password=`echo
<replaceable>password</replaceable> | iconv -t
iso-8859-1`</option> to qpdf where
<replaceable>password</replaceable> is a password specified in
your terminal's locale. A detailed discussion of this is out of
scope for this manual, but just be aware of this issue if you have
trouble with a password that contains 8-bit characters.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.encryption-options">
<title>Encryption Options</title>
<para>
To change the encryption parameters of a file, use the --encrypt
flag. The syntax is
<programlisting><option>--encrypt <replaceable>user-password</replaceable> <replaceable>owner-password</replaceable> <replaceable>key-length</replaceable> [ <replaceable>restrictions</replaceable> ] --</option>
</programlisting>
Note that “<option>--</option>” terminates parsing of
encryption flags and must be present even if no restrictions are
present.
</para>
<para>
Either or both of the user password and the owner password may be
empty strings.
</para>
<para>
The value for
<option><replaceable>key-length</replaceable></option> may be 40
or 128. The restriction flags are dependent upon key length.
When no additional restrictions are given, the default is to be
fully permissive.
</para>
<para>
If <option><replaceable>key-length</replaceable></option> is 40,
the following restriction options are available:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--print=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether or not to allow printing.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--modify=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether or not to allow document modification.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--extract=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether or not to allow text/image extraction.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--annotate=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether or not to allow comments and form fill-in
and signing.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
If <option><replaceable>key-length</replaceable></option> is 128,
the following restriction options are available:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--accessibility=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether or not to allow accessibility to visually
impaired.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--extract=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether or not to allow text/graphic extraction.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--print=<replaceable>print-opt</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Controls printing access.
<option><replaceable>print-opt</replaceable></option> may be
one of the following:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>full</option>: allow full printing
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>low</option>: allow low-resolution printing only
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>none</option>: disallow printing
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--modify=<replaceable>modify-opt</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Controls modify access.
<option><replaceable>modify-opt</replaceable></option> may be
one of the following, each of which implies all the options
that follow it:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>all</option>: allow full document modification
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>annotate</option>: allow comment authoring and form operations
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>form</option>: allow form field fill-in and signing
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>assembly</option>: allow document assembly only
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>none</option>: allow no modifications
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--cleartext-metadata</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If specified, any metadata stream in the document will be left
unencrypted even if the rest of the document is encrypted.
This also forces the PDF version to be at least 1.5.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--use-aes=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If <option>--use-aes=y</option> is specified, AES encryption
will be used instead of RC4 encryption. This forces the PDF
version to be at least 1.6.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--force-V4</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Use of this option forces the <literal>/V</literal> and
<literal>/R</literal> parameters in the document's encryption
dictionary to be set to the value <literal>4</literal>. As
qpdf will automatically do this when required, there is no
reason to ever use this option. It exists primarily for use
in testing qpdf itself. This option also forces the PDF
version to be at least 1.5.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
The default for each permission option is to be fully permissive.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.page-selection">
<title>Page Selection Options</title>
<para>
Starting with qpdf 3.0, it is possible to split and merge PDF
files by selecting pages from one or more input files. Whatever
file is given as the primary input file is used as the starting
point, but its pages are replaced with pages as specified.
<programlisting><option>--pages <replaceable>input-file</replaceable> [ <replaceable>--password=password</replaceable> ] <replaceable>page-range</replaceable> [ ... ] --</option>
</programlisting>
Multiple input files may be specified. Each one is given as the
name of the input file, an optional password (if required to open
the file), and the range of pages. Note that
“<option>--</option>” terminates parsing of page
selection flags.
</para>
<para>
For each file that pages should be taken from, specify the file, a
password needed to open the file (if any), and a page range. The
password needs to be given only once per file. If any of the
input files are the same as the primary input file or the file
used to copy encryption parameters (if specified), you do not need
to repeat the password here. The same file can be repeated
multiple times. If a file that is repeated has a password, the
password only has to be given the first time. All non-page data
(info, outlines, page numbers, etc.) are taken from the primary
input file. To discard these, use <option>--empty</option> as the
primary input.
</para>
<para>
It is not presently possible to specify the same page from the
same file directly more than once, but you can make this work by
specifying two different paths to the same file (such as by
putting <filename>./</filename> somewhere in the path). This can
also be used if you want to repeat a page from one of the input
files in the output file. This may be made more convenient in a
future version of qpdf if there is enough demand for this feature.
</para>
<para>
The page range is a set of numbers separated by commas, ranges of
numbers separated dashes, or combinations of those. The character
“z” represents the last page. Pages can appear in any
order. Ranges can appear with a high number followed by a low
number, which causes the pages to appear in reverse. Repeating a
number will cause an error, but you can use the workaround
discussed above should you really want to include the same page
twice.
</para>
<para>
Example page ranges:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>1,3,5-9,15-12</literal>: pages 1, 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 15, 14, 13, and 12.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>z-1</literal>: all pages in the document in reverse
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Note that qpdf doesn't presently do anything special about other
constructs in a PDF file that may know about pages, so semantics
of splitting and merging vary across features. For example, the
document's outlines (bookmarks) point to actual page objects, so
if you select some pages and not others, bookmarks that point to
pages that are in the output file will work, and remaining
bookmarks will not work. On the other hand, page labels (page
numbers specified in the file) are just sequential, so page labels
will be messed up in the output file. A future version of
<command>qpdf</command> may do a better job at handling these
issues. (Note that the qpdf library already contains all of the
APIs required in order to implement this in your own application
if you need it.) In the mean time, you can always use
<option>--empty</option> as the primary input file to avoid
copying all of that from the first file. For example, to take
pages 1 through 5 from a <filename>infile.pdf</filename> while
preserving all metadata associated with that file, you could use
<programlisting><command>qpdf</command> <option>infile.pdf --pages infile.pdf 1-5 -- outfile.pdf</option>
</programlisting>
If you wanted pages 1 through 5 from
<filename>infile.pdf</filename> but you wanted the rest of the
metadata to be dropped, you could instead run
<programlisting><command>qpdf</command> <option>--empty --pages infile.pdf 1-5 -- outfile.pdf</option>
</programlisting>
If you wanted to take pages 1–5 from
<filename>file1.pdf</filename> and pages 11–15 from
<filename>file2.pdf</filename> in reverse, you would run
<programlisting><command>qpdf</command> <option>file1.pdf --pages file1.pdf 1-5 file2.pdf 15-11 -- outfile.pdf</option>
</programlisting>
If, for some reason, you wanted to take the first page of an
encrypted file called <filename>encrypted.pdf</filename> with
password <literal>pass</literal> and repeat it twice in an output
file, and if you wanted to drop metadata (like page numbers and
outlines) but preserve encryption, you would use
<programlisting><command>qpdf</command> <option>--empty --copy-encryption=encrypted.pdf --encryption-file-password=pass
--pages encrypted.pdf --password=pass 1 ./encrypted.pdf --password=pass 1 --
outfile.pdf</option>
</programlisting>
Note that we had to specify the password all three times because
giving a password as <option>--encryption-file-password</option>
doesn't count for page selection, and as far as qpdf is concerned,
<filename>encrypted.pdf</filename> and
<filename>./encrypted.pdf</filename> are separated files. These
are all corner cases that most users should hopefully never have
to be bothered with.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.advanced-transformation">
<title>Advanced Transformation Options</title>
<para>
These transformation options control fine points of how qpdf
creates the output file. Mostly these are of use only to people
who are very familiar with the PDF file format or who are PDF
developers. The following options are available:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--stream-data=<replaceable>option</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Controls transformation of stream data. The value of
<option><replaceable>option</replaceable></option> may be one
of the following:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>compress</option>: recompress stream data when
possible (default)
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>preserve</option>: leave all stream data as is
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>uncompress</option>: uncompress stream data when
possible
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--normalize-content=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Enables or disables normalization of content streams.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--suppress-recovery</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Prevents qpdf from attempting to recover damaged files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--object-streams=<replaceable>mode</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Controls handing of object streams. The value of
<option><replaceable>mode</replaceable></option> may be one of
the following:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>preserve</option>: preserve original object streams
(default)
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>disable</option>: don't write any object streams
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>generate</option>: use object streams wherever
possible
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--ignore-xref-streams</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Tells qpdf to ignore any cross-reference streams.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--qdf</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Turns on QDF mode. For additional information on QDF, please
see <xref linkend="ref.qdf"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--min-version=<replaceable>version</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Forces the PDF version of the output file to be at least
<replaceable>version</replaceable>. In other words, if the
input file has a lower version than the specified version, the
specified version will be used. If the input file has a
higher version, the input file's original version will be
used. It is seldom necessary to use this option since qpdf
will automatically increase the version as needed when adding
features that require newer PDF readers.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--force-version=<replaceable>version</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option forces the PDF version to be the exact version
specified <emphasis>even when the file may have content that
is not supported in that version</emphasis>. In some cases,
forcing the output file's PDF version to be lower than that of
the input file will cause qpdf to disable certain features of
the document. Specifically, AES encryption is disabled if the
version is less than 1.6, cleartext metadata and object
streams are disabled if less than 1.5, 128-bit encryption keys
are disabled if less than 1.4, and all encryption is disabled
if less than 1.3. Even with these precautions, qpdf won't be
able to do things like eliminate use of newer image
compression schemes, transparency groups, or other features
that may have been added in more recent versions of PDF.
</para>
<para>
As a general rule, with the exception of big structural things
like the use of object streams or AES encryption, PDF viewers
are supposed to ignore features in files that they don't
support from newer versions. This means that forcing the
version to a lower version may make it possible to open your
PDF file with an older version, though bear in mind that some
of the original document's functionality may be lost.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
<para>
By default, when a stream is encoded using non-lossy filters that
qpdf understands and is not already compressed using a good
compression scheme, qpdf will uncompress and recompress streams.
Assuming proper filter implements, this is safe and generally
results in smaller files. This behavior may also be explicitly
requested with <option>--stream-data=compress</option>.
</para>
<para>
When <option>--stream-data=preserve</option> is specified, qpdf
will never attempt to change the filtering of any stream data.
</para>
<para>
When <option>--stream-data=uncompress</option> is specified, qpdf
will attempt to remove any non-lossy filters that it supports.
This includes <literal>/FlateDecode</literal>,
<literal>/LZWDecode</literal>, <literal>/ASCII85Decode</literal>,
and <literal>/ASCIIHexDecode</literal>. This can be very useful
for inspecting the contents of various streams.
</para>
<para>
When <option>--normalize-content=y</option> is specified, qpdf
will attempt to normalize whitespace and newlines in page content
streams. This is generally safe but could, in some cases, cause
damage to the content streams. This option is intended for people
who wish to study PDF content streams or to debug PDF content.
You should not use this for “production” PDF files.
</para>
<para>
Ordinarily, qpdf will attempt to recover from certain types of
errors in PDF files. These include errors in the cross-reference
table, certain types of object numbering errors, and certain types
of stream length errors. Sometimes, qpdf may think it has
recovered but may not have actually recovered, so care should be
taken when using this option as some data loss is possible. The
<option>--suppress-recovery</option> option will prevent qpdf from
attempting recovery. In this case, it will fail on the first
error that it encounters.
</para>
<para>
Object streams, also known as compressed objects, were introduced
into the PDF specification at version 1.5, corresponding to
Acrobat 6. Some older PDF viewers may not support files with
object streams. qpdf can be used to transform files with object
streams to files without object streams or vice versa. As
mentioned above, there are three object stream modes:
<option>preserve</option>, <option>disable</option>, and
<option>generate</option>.
</para>
<para>
In <option>preserve</option> mode, the relationship to objects and
the streams that contain them is preserved from the original file.
In <option>disable</option> mode, all objects are written as
regular, uncompressed objects. The resulting file should be
readable by older PDF viewers. (Of course, the content of the
files may include features not supported by older viewers, but at
least the structure will be supported.) In
<option>generate</option> mode, qpdf will create its own object
streams. This will usually result in more compact PDF files,
though they may not be readable by older viewers. In this mode,
qpdf will also make sure the PDF version number in the header is
at least 1.5.
</para>
<para>
Ordinarily, qpdf reads cross-reference streams when they are
present in a PDF file. If <option>--ignore-xref-streams</option>
is specified, qpdf will ignore any cross-reference streams for
hybrid PDF files. The purpose of hybrid files is to make some
content available to viewers that are not aware of cross-reference
streams. It is almost never desirable to ignore them. The only
time when you might want to use this feature is if you are testing
creation of hybrid PDF files and wish to see how a PDF consumer
that doesn't understand object and cross-reference streams would
interpret such a file.
</para>
<para>
The <option>--qdf</option> flag turns on QDF mode, which changes
some of the defaults described above. Specifically, in QDF mode,
by default, stream data is uncompressed, content streams are
normalized, and encryption is removed. These defaults can still
be overridden by specifying the appropriate options as described
above. Additionally, in QDF mode, stream lengths are stored as
indirect objects, objects are laid out in a less efficient but
more readable fashion, and the documents are interspersed with
comments that make it easier for the user to find things and also
make it possible for <command>fix-qdf</command> to work properly.
QDF mode is intended for people, mostly developers, who wish to
inspect or modify PDF files in a text editor. For details, please
see <xref linkend="ref.qdf"/>.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.testing-options">
<title>Testing, Inspection, and Debugging Options</title>
<para>
These options can be useful for digging into PDF files or for use
in automated test suites for software that uses the qpdf library.
When any of the options in this section are specified, no output
file should be given. The following options are available:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--static-id</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Causes generation of a fixed value for /ID. This is intended
for testing only. Never use it for production files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--static-aes-iv</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Causes use of a static initialization vector for AES-CBC.
This is intended for testing only so that output files can be
reproducible. Never use it for production files. This option
in particular is not secure since it significantly weakens the
encryption.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--no-original-object-ids</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Suppresses inclusion of original object ID comments in QDF
files. This can be useful when generating QDF files for test
purposes, particularly when comparing them to determine
whether two PDF files have identical content.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-show-encryption</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Shows document encryption parameters. Also shows the
document's user password if the owner password is given.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-check-linearization</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Checks file integrity and linearization status.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-show-linearization</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Checks and displays all data in the linearization hint tables.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-show-xref</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Shows the contents of the cross-reference table in a
human-readable form. This is especially useful for files with
cross-reference streams which are stored in a binary format.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-show-object=obj[,gen]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Show the contents of the given object. This is especially
useful for inspecting objects that are inside of object
streams (also known as “compressed objects”).
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-raw-stream-data</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
When used along with the <option>--show-object</option>
option, if the object is a stream, shows the raw stream data
instead of object's contents.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-filtered-stream-data</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
When used along with the <option>--show-object</option>
option, if the object is a stream, shows the filtered stream
data instead of object's contents. If the stream is filtered
using filters that qpdf does not support, an error will be
issued.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-show-pages</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Shows the object and generation number for each page
dictionary object and for each content stream associated with
the page. Having this information makes it more convenient to
inspect objects from a particular page.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-with-images</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
When used along with <option>--show-pages</option>, also shows
the object and generation numbers for the image objects on
each page. (At present, information about images in shared
resource dictionaries are not output by this command. This is
discussed in a comment in the source code.)
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>-check</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Checks file structure and well as encryption, linearization,
and encoding of stream data. A file for which
<option>--check</option> reports no errors may still have
errors in stream data content but should otherwise be
structurally sound. If <option>--check</option> any errors,
qpdf will exit with a status of 2. There are some recoverable
conditions that <option>--check</option> detects. These are
issued as warnings instead of errors. If qpdf finds no errors
but finds warnings, it will exit with a status of 3 (as of
version 2.0.4).
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
<para>
The <option>--raw-stream-data</option> and
<option>--filtered-stream-data</option> options are ignored unless
<option>--show-object</option> is given. Either of these options
will cause the stream data to be written to standard output. In
order to avoid commingling of stream data with other output, it is
recommend that these objects not be combined with other
test/inspection options.
</para>
<para>
If <option>--filtered-stream-data</option> is given and
<option>--normalize-content=y</option> is also given, qpdf will
attempt to normalize the stream data as if it is a page content
stream. This attempt will be made even if it is not a page
content stream, in which case it will produce unusable results.
</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.qdf">
<title>QDF Mode</title>
<para>
In QDF mode, qpdf creates PDF files in what we call <firstterm>QDF
form</firstterm>. A PDF file in QDF form, sometimes called a QDF
file, is a completely valid PDF file that has
<literal>%QDF-1.0</literal> as its third line (after the pdf header
and binary characters) and has certain other characteristics. The
purpose of QDF form is to make it possible to edit PDF files, with
some restrictions, in an ordinary text editor. This can be very
useful for experimenting with different PDF constructs or for
making one-off edits to PDF files (though there are other reasons
why this may not always work).
</para>
<para>
It is ordinarily very difficult to edit PDF files in a text editor
for two reasons: most meaningful data in PDF files is compressed,
and PDF files are full of offset and length information that makes
it hard to add or remove data. A QDF file is organized in a manner
such that, if edits are kept within certain constraints, the
<command>fix-qdf</command> program, distributed with qpdf, is able
to restore edited files to a correct state. The
<command>fix-qdf</command> program takes no command-line
arguments. It reads a possibly edited QDF file from standard input
and writes a repaired file to standard output.
</para>
<para>
The following attributes characterize a QDF file:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
All objects appear in numerical order in the PDF file, including
when objects appear in object streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Objects are printed in an easy-to-read format, and all line
endings are normalized to UNIX line endings.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Unless specifically overridden, streams appear uncompressed
(when qpdf supports the filters and they are compressed with a
non-lossy compression scheme), and most content streams are
normalized (line endings are converted to just a UNIX-style
linefeeds).
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
All streams lengths are represented as indirect objects, and the
stream length object is always the next object after the stream.
If the stream data does not end with a newline, an extra newline
is inserted, and a special comment appears after the stream
indicating that this has been done.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If the PDF file contains object streams, if object stream
<emphasis>n</emphasis> contains <emphasis>k</emphasis> objects,
those objects are numbered from <emphasis>n+1</emphasis> through
<emphasis>n+k</emphasis>, and the object number/offset pairs
appear on a separate line for each object. Additionally, each
object in the object stream is preceded by a comment indicating
its object number and index. This makes it very easy to find
objects in object streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
All beginnings of objects, <literal>stream</literal> tokens,
<literal>endstream</literal> tokens, and
<literal>endobj</literal> tokens appear on lines by themselves.
A blank line follows every <literal>endobj</literal> token.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If there is a cross-reference stream, it is unfiltered.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Page dictionaries and page content streams are marked with
special comments that make them easy to find.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Comments precede each object indicating the object number of the
corresponding object in the original file.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
When editing a QDF file, any edits can be made as long as the above
constraints are maintained. This means that you can freely edit a
page's content without worrying about messing up the QDF file. It
is also possible to add new objects so long as those objects are
added after the last object in the file or subsequent objects are
renumbered. If a QDF file has object streams in it, you can always
add the new objects before the xref stream and then change the
number of the xref stream, since nothing generally ever references
it by number.
</para>
<para>
It is not generally practical to remove objects from QDF files
without messing up object numbering, but if you remove all
references to an object, you can run qpdf on the file (after
running <command>fix-qdf</command>), and qpdf will omit the
now-orphaned object.
</para>
<para>
When <command>fix-qdf</command> is run, it goes through the file
and recomputes the following parts of the file:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
the <literal>/N</literal>, <literal>/W</literal>, and
<literal>/First</literal> keys of all object stream dictionaries
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
the pairs of numbers representing object numbers and offsets of
objects in object streams
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
all stream lengths
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
the cross-reference table or cross-reference stream
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
the offset to the cross-reference table or cross-reference
stream following the <literal>startxref</literal> token
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.using-library">
<title>Using the QPDF Library</title>
<para>
The source tree for the qpdf package has an
<filename>examples</filename> directory that contains a few
example programs. The <filename>qpdf/qpdf.cc</filename> source
file also serves as a useful example since it exercises almost all
of the qpdf library's public interface. The best source of
documentation on the library itself is reading comments in
<filename>include/qpdf/QPDF.hh</filename>,
<filename>include/qpdf/QDFWriter.hh</filename>, and
<filename>include/qpdf/QPDFObjectHandle.hh</filename>.
</para>
<para>
All header files are installed in the <filename>include/qpdf</filename> directory. It
is recommend that you use <literal>#include
<qpdf/QPDF.hh></literal> rather than adding
<filename>include/qpdf</filename> to your include path.
</para>
<para>
When linking against the qpdf static library, you may also need to
specify <literal>-lpcre -lz</literal> on your link command. If
your system understands how to read libtool
<filename>.la</filename> files, this may not be necessary.
</para>
<para>
The qpdf library is safe to use in a multithreaded program, but no
individual <type>QPDF</type> object instance (including
<type>QPDF</type>, <type>QPDFObjectHandle</type>, or
<type>QPDFWriter</type>) can be used in more than one thread at a
time. Multiple threads may simultaneously work with different
instances of these and all other QPDF objects.
</para>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.design">
<title>Design and Library Notes</title>
<sect1 id="ref.design.intro">
<title>Introduction</title>
<para>
This section was written prior to the implementation of the qpdf
package and was subsequently modified to reflect the
implementation. In some cases, for purposes of explanation, it
may differ slightly from the actual implementation. As always,
the source code and test suite are authoritative. Even if there
are some errors, this document should serve as a road map to
understanding how this code works.
</para>
<para>
In general, one should adhere strictly to a specification when
writing but be liberal in reading. This way, the product of our
software will be accepted by the widest range of other programs,
and we will accept the widest range of input files. This library
attempts to conform to that philosophy whenever possible but also
aims to provide strict checking for people who want to validate
PDF files. If you don't want to see warnings and are trying to
write something that is tolerant, you can call
<literal>setSuppressWarnings(true)</literal>. If you want to fail
on the first error, you can call
<literal>setAttemptRecovery(false)</literal>. The default
behavior is to generating warnings for recoverable problems. Note
that recovery will not always produce the desired results even if
it is able to get through the file. Unlike most other PDF files
that produce generic warnings such as “This file is
damaged,”, qpdf generally issues a detailed error message
that would be most useful to a PDF developer. This is by design
as there seems to be a shortage of PDF validation tools out
there. (This was, in fact, one of the major motivations behind
the initial creation of qpdf.)
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.design-goals">
<title>Design Goals</title>
<para>
The QPDF package includes support for reading and rewriting PDF
files. It aims to hide from the user details involving object
locations, modified (appended) PDF files, the
directness/indirectness of objects, and stream filters including
encryption. It does not aim to hide knowledge of the object
hierarchy or content stream contents. Put another way, a user of
the qpdf library is expected to have knowledge about how PDF files
work, but is not expected to have to keep track of bookkeeping
details such as file positions.
</para>
<para>
A user of the library never has to care whether an object is
direct or indirect. All access to objects deals with this
transparently. All memory management details are also handled by
the library.
</para>
<para>
The <classname>PointerHolder</classname> object is used internally
by the library to deal with memory management. This is basically
a smart pointer object very similar in spirit to the Boost
library's <classname>shared_ptr</classname> object, but predating
it by several years. This library also makes use of a technique
for giving fine-grained access to methods in one class to other
classes by using public subclasses with friends and only private
members that in turn call private methods of the containing class.
See <classname>QPDFObjectHandle::Factory</classname> as an
example.
</para>
<para>
The top-level qpdf class is <classname>QPDF</classname>. A
<classname>QPDF</classname> object represents a PDF file. The
library provides methods for both accessing and mutating PDF
files.
</para>
<para>
<classname>QPDFObject</classname> is the basic PDF Object class.
It is an abstract base class from which are derived classes for
each type of PDF object. Clients do not interact with Objects
directly but instead interact with
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>.
</para>
<para>
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> contains
<classname>PointerHolder<QPDFObject></classname> and
includes accessor methods that are type-safe proxies to the
methods of the derived object classes as well as methods for
querying object types. They can be passed around by value,
copied, stored in containers, etc. with very low overhead.
Instances of <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> always
contain a reference back to the <classname>QPDF</classname> object
from which they were created. A
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> may be direct or indirect.
If indirect, the <classname>QPDFObject</classname> the
<classname>PointerHolder</classname> initially points to is a null
pointer. In this case, the first attempt to access the underlying
<classname>QPDFObject</classname> will result in the
<classname>QPDFObject</classname> being resolved via a call to the
referenced <classname>QPDF</classname> instance. This makes it
essentially impossible to make coding errors in which certain
things will work for some PDF files and not for others based on
which objects are direct and which objects are indirect.
</para>
<para>
Instances of <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> can be
directly created and modified using static factory methods in the
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> class. There are factory
methods for each type of object as well as a convenience method
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::parse</function> that creates an
object from a string representation of the object. Existing
instances of <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> can also be
modified in several ways. See comments in
<filename>QPDFObjectHandle.hh</filename> for details.
</para>
<para>
When the <classname>QPDF</classname> class creates a new object,
it dynamically allocates the appropriate type of
<classname>QPDFObject</classname> and immediately hands the
pointer to an instance of <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>.
The parser reads a token from the current file position. If the
token is a not either a dictionary or array opener, an object is
immediately constructed from the single token and the parser
returns. Otherwise, the parser is invoked recursively in a
special mode in which it accumulates objects until it finds a
balancing closer. During this process, the
“<literal>R</literal>” keyword is recognized and an
indirect <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> may be
constructed.
</para>
<para>
The <function>QPDF::resolve()</function> method, which is used to
resolve an indirect object, may be invoked from the
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> class. It first checks a
cache to see whether this object has already been read. If not,
it reads the object from the PDF file and caches it. It the
returns the resulting <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>.
The calling object handle then replaces its
<classname>PointerHolder<QDFObject></classname> with the one
from the newly returned <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>.
In this way, only a single copy of any direct object need exist
and clients can access objects transparently without knowing
caring whether they are direct or indirect objects. Additionally,
no object is ever read from the file more than once. That means
that only the portions of the PDF file that are actually needed
are ever read from the input file, thus allowing the qpdf package
to take advantage of this important design goal of PDF files.
</para>
<para>
If the requested object is inside of an object stream, the object
stream itself is first read into memory. Then the tokenizer reads
objects from the memory stream based on the offset information
stored in the stream. Those individual objects are cached, after
which the temporary buffer holding the object stream contents are
discarded. In this way, the first time an object in an object
stream is requested, all objects in the stream are cached.
</para>
<para>
An instance of <classname>QPDF</classname> is constructed by using
the class's default constructor. If desired, the
<classname>QPDF</classname> object may be configured with various
methods that change its default behavior. Then the
<function>QPDF::processFile()</function> method is passed the name
of a PDF file, which permanently associates the file with that
QPDF object. A password may also be given for access to
password-protected files. QPDF does not enforce encryption
parameters and will treat user and owner passwords equivalently.
Either password may be used to access an encrypted file.
<footnote>
<para>
As pointed out earlier, the intention is not for qpdf to be used
to bypass security on files. but as any open source PDF consumer
may be easily modified to bypass basic PDF document security,
and qpdf offers may transformations that can do this as well,
there seems to be little point in the added complexity of
conditionally enforcing document security.
</para>
</footnote>
<classname>QPDF</classname> will allow recovery of a user password
given an owner password. The input PDF file must be seekable.
(Output files written by <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> need
not be seekable, even when creating linearized files.) During
construction, <classname>QPDF</classname> validates the PDF file's
header, and then reads the cross reference tables and trailer
dictionaries. The <classname>QPDF</classname> class keeps only
the first trailer dictionary though it does read all of them so it
can check the <literal>/Prev</literal> key.
<classname>QPDF</classname> class users may request the root
object and the trailer dictionary specifically. The cross
reference table is kept private. Objects may then be requested by
number of by walking the object tree.
</para>
<para>
When a PDF file has a cross-reference stream instead of a
cross-reference table and trailer, requesting the document's
trailer dictionary returns the stream dictionary from the
cross-reference stream instead.
</para>
<para>
There are some convenience routines for very common operations
such as walking the page tree and returning a vector of all page
objects. For full details, please see the header file
<filename>QPDF.hh</filename>.
</para>
<para>
The following example should clarify how
<classname>QPDF</classname> processes a simple file.
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Client constructs <classname>QPDF</classname>
<varname>pdf</varname> and calls
<function>pdf.processFile("a.pdf");</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <classname>QPDF</classname> class checks the beginning of
<filename>a.pdf</filename> for
<literal>%!PDF-1.[0-9]+</literal>. It then reads the cross
reference table mentioned at the end of the file, ensuring that
it is looking before the last <literal>%%EOF</literal>. After
getting to <literal>trailer</literal> keyword, it invokes the
parser.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The parser sees “<literal><<</literal>”, so
it calls itself recursively in dictionary creation mode.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
In dictionary creation mode, the parser keeps accumulating
objects until it encounters
“<literal>>></literal>”. Each object that is
read is pushed onto a stack. If
“<literal>R</literal>” is read, the last two
objects on the stack are inspected. If they are integers, they
are popped off the stack and their values are used to construct
an indirect object handle which is then pushed onto the stack.
When “<literal>>></literal>” is finally read,
the stack is converted into a
<classname>QPDF_Dictionary</classname> which is placed in a
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> and returned.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The resulting dictionary is saved as the trailer dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <literal>/Prev</literal> key is searched. If present,
<classname>QPDF</classname> seeks to that point and repeats
except that the new trailer dictionary is not saved. If
<literal>/Prev</literal> is not present, the initial parsing
process is complete.
</para>
<para>
If there is an encryption dictionary, the document's encryption
parameters are initialized.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The client requests root object. The
<classname>QPDF</classname> class gets the value of root key
from trailer dictionary and returns it. It is an unresolved
indirect <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The client requests the <literal>/Pages</literal> key from root
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>. The
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> notices that it is
indirect so it asks <classname>QPDF</classname> to resolve it.
<classname>QPDF</classname> looks in the object cache for an
object with the root dictionary's object ID and generation
number. Upon not seeing it, it checks the cross reference
table, gets the offset, and reads the object present at that
offset. It stores the result in the object cache and returns
the cached result. The calling
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> replaces its object
pointer with the one from the resolved
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>, verifies that it a
valid dictionary object, and returns the (unresolved indirect)
<classname>QPDFObject</classname> handle to the top of the
Pages hierarchy.
</para>
<para>
As the client continues to request objects, the same process is
followed for each new requested object.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.encryption">
<title>Encryption</title>
<para>
Encryption is supported transparently by qpdf. When opening a PDF
file, if an encryption dictionary exists, the
<classname>QPDF</classname> object processes this dictionary using
the password (if any) provided. The primary decryption key is
computed and cached. No further access is made to the encryption
dictionary after that time. When an object is read from a file,
the object ID and generation of the object in which it is
contained is always known. Using this information along with the
stored encryption key, all stream and string objects are
transparently decrypted. Raw encrypted objects are never stored
in memory. This way, nothing in the library ever has to know or
care whether it is reading an encrypted file.
</para>
<para>
An interface is also provided for writing encrypted streams and
strings given an encryption key. This is used by
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> when it rewrites encrypted
files.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.adding-and-remove-pages">
<title>Adding and Removing Pages</title>
<para>
While qpdf's API has supported adding and modifying objects for
some time, version 3.0 introduces specific methods for adding and
removing pages. These are largely convenience routines that
handle two tricky issues: pushing inheritable resources from the
<literal>/Pages</literal> tree down to individual pages and
manipulation of the <literal>/Pages</literal> tree itself. For
details, see <function>addPage</function> and surrounding methods
in <filename>QPDF.hh</filename>.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.reserved-objects">
<title>Reserving Object Numbers</title>
<para>
Version 3.0 of qpdf introduced the concept of reserved objects.
These are seldom needed for ordinary operations, but there are
cases in which you may want to add a series of indirect objects
with references to each other to a <classname>QPDF</classname>
object. This causes a problem because you can't determine the
object ID that a new indirect object will have until you add it to
the <classname>QPDF</classname> object with
<function>QPDF::makeIndirectObject</function>. The only way to
add two mutually referential objects to a
<classname>QPDF</classname> object prior to version 3.0 would be
to add the new objects first and then make them refer to each
other after adding them. Now it is possible to create a
<firstterm>reserved object</firstterm> using
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::newReserved</function>. This is an
indirect object that stays “unresolved” even if it is
queried for its type. So now, if you want to create a set of
mutually referential objects, you can create reservations for each
one of them and use those reservations to construct the
references. When finished, you can call
<function>QPDF::replaceReserved</function> to replace the reserved
objects with the real ones. This functionality will never be
needed by most applications, but it is used internally by QPDF
when copying objects from other PDF files, as discussed in <xref
linkend="ref.foreign-objects"/>. For an example of how to use
reserved objects, search for <function>newReserved</function> in
<filename>test_driver.cc</filename> in qpdf's sources.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.foreign-objects">
<title>Copying Objects From Other PDF Files</title>
<para>
Version 3.0 of qpdf introduced the ability to copy objects into a
<classname>QPDF</classname> object from a different
<classname>QPDF</classname> object, which we refer to as
<firstterm>foreign objects</firstterm>. This allows arbitrary
merging of PDF files. The <command>qpdf</command> command-line
tool provides limited support for basic page selection, including
merging in pages from other files, but the library's API makes it
possible to implement arbitrarily complex merging operations. The
main method for copying foreign objects is
<function>QPDF::copyForeignObject</function>. This takes an
indirect object from another <classname>QPDF</classname> and
copies it recursively into this object while preserving all object
structure, including circular references. This means you can add
a direct object that you create from scratch to a
<classname>QPDF</classname> object with
<function>QPDF::makeIndirectObject</function>, and you can add an
indirect object from another file with
<function>QPDF::copyForeignObject</function>. The fact that
<function>QPDF::makeIndirectObject</function> does not
automatically detect a foreign object and copy it is an explicit
design decision. Copying a foreign object seems like a
sufficiently significant thing to do that it should be done
explicitly.
</para>
<para>
The other way to copy foreign objects is by passing a page from
one <classname>QPDF</classname> to another by calling
<function>QPDF::addPage</function>. In contrast to
<function>QPDF::makeIndirectObject</function>, this method
automatically distinguishes between indirect objects in the
current file, foreign objects, and direct objects.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.rewriting">
<title>Writing PDF Files</title>
<para>
The qpdf library supports file writing of
<classname>QPDF</classname> objects to PDF files through the
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> class. The
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> class has two writing modes: one
for non-linearized files, and one for linearized files. See <xref
linkend="ref.linearization"/> for a description of linearization
is implemented. This section describes how we write
non-linearized files including the creation of QDF files (see
<xref linkend="ref.qdf"/>.
</para>
<para>
This outline was written prior to implementation and is not
exactly accurate, but it provides a correct “notional”
idea of how writing works. Look at the code in
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> for exact details.
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Initialize state:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
next object number = 1
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
object queue = empty
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
renumber table: old object id/generation to new id/0 = empty
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
xref table: new id -> offset = empty
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Create a QPDF object from a file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Write header for new PDF file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Request the trailer dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
For each value that is an indirect object, grab the next object
number (via an operation that returns and increments the
number). Map object to new number in renumber table. Push
object onto queue.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
While there are more objects on the queue:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Pop queue.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Look up object's new number <emphasis>n</emphasis> in the
renumbering table.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Store current offset into xref table.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Write <literal><replaceable>n</replaceable> 0 obj</literal>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If object is null, whether direct or indirect, write out
null, thus eliminating unresolvable indirect object
references.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If the object is a stream stream, write stream contents,
piped through any filters as required, to a memory buffer.
Use this buffer to determine the stream length.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If object is not a stream, array, or dictionary, write out
its contents.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If object is an array or dictionary (including stream),
traverse its elements (for array) or values (for
dictionaries), handling recursive dictionaries and arrays,
looking for indirect objects. When an indirect object is
found, if it is not resolvable, ignore. (This case is
handled when writing it out.) Otherwise, look it up in the
renumbering table. If not found, grab the next available
object number, assign to the referenced object in the
renumbering table, and push the referenced object onto the
queue. As a special case, when writing out a stream
dictionary, replace length, filters, and decode parameters
as required.
</para>
<para>
Write out dictionary or array, replacing any unresolvable
indirect object references with null (pdf spec says
reference to non-existent object is legal and resolves to
null) and any resolvable ones with references to the
renumbered objects.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If the object is a stream, write
<literal>stream\n</literal>, the stream contents (from the
memory buffer), and <literal>\nendstream\n</literal>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When done, write <literal>endobj</literal>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Once we have finished the queue, all referenced objects will have
been written out and all deleted objects or unreferenced objects
will have been skipped. The new cross-reference table will
contain an offset for every new object number from 1 up to the
number of objects written. This can be used to write out a new
xref table. Finally we can write out the trailer dictionary with
appropriately computed /ID (see spec, 8.3, File Identifiers), the
cross reference table offset, and <literal>%%EOF</literal>.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.filtered-streams">
<title>Filtered Streams</title>
<para>
Support for streams is implemented through the
<classname>Pipeline</classname> interface which was designed for
this package.
</para>
<para>
When reading streams, create a series of
<classname>Pipeline</classname> objects. The
<classname>Pipeline</classname> abstract base requires
implementation <function>write()</function> and
<function>finish()</function> and provides an implementation of
<function>getNext()</function>. Each pipeline object, upon
receiving data, does whatever it is going to do and then writes
the data (possibly modified) to its successor. Alternatively, a
pipeline may be an end-of-the-line pipeline that does something
like store its output to a file or a memory buffer ignoring a
successor. For additional details, look at
<filename>Pipeline.hh</filename>.
</para>
<para>
<classname>QPDF</classname> can read raw or filtered streams.
When reading a filtered stream, the <classname>QPDF</classname>
class creates a <classname>Pipeline</classname> object for one of
each appropriate filter object and chains them together. The last
filter should write to whatever type of output is required. The
<classname>QPDF</classname> class has an interface to write raw or
filtered stream contents to a given pipeline.
</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.linearization">
<title>Linearization</title>
<para>
This chapter describes how <classname>QPDF</classname> and
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> implement creation and processing
of linearized PDFS.
</para>
<sect1 id="ref.linearization-strategy">
<title>Basic Strategy for Linearization</title>
<para>
To avoid the incestuous problem of having the qpdf library
validate its own linearized files, we have a special linearized
file checking mode which can be invoked via <command>qpdf
--check-linearization</command> (or <command>qpdf
--check</command>). This mode reads the linearization parameter
dictionary and the hint streams and validates that object
ordering, parameters, and hint stream contents are correct. The
validation code was first tested against linearized files created
by external tools (Acrobat and pdlin) and then used to validate
files created by <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> itself.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.linearized.preparation">
<title>Preparing For Linearization</title>
<para>
Before creating a linearized PDF file from any other PDF file, the
PDF file must be altered such that all page attributes are
propagated down to the page level (and not inherited from parents
in the <literal>/Pages</literal> tree). We also have to know
which objects refer to which other objects, being concerned with
page boundaries and a few other cases. We refer to this part of
preparing the PDF file as <firstterm>optimization</firstterm>,
discussed in <xref linkend="ref.optimization"/>. Note the, in
this context, the term <firstterm>optimization</firstterm> is a
qpdf term, and the term <firstterm>linearization</firstterm> is a
term from the PDF specification. Do not be confused by the fact
that many applications refer to linearization as optimization or
web optimization.
</para>
<para>
When creating linearized PDF files from optimized PDF files, there
are really only a few issues that need to be dealt with:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Creation of hints tables
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Placing objects in the correct order
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Filling in offsets and byte sizes
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.optimization">
<title>Optimization</title>
<para>
In order to perform various operations such as linearization and
splitting files into pages, it is necessary to know which objects
are referenced by which pages, page thumbnails, and root and
trailer dictionary keys. It is also necessary to ensure that all
page-level attributes appear directly at the page level and are
not inherited from parents in the pages tree.
</para>
<para>
We refer to the process of enforcing these constraints as
<firstterm>optimization</firstterm>. As mentioned above, note
that some applications refer to linearization as optimization.
Although this optimization was initially motivated by the need to
create linearized files, we are using these terms separately.
</para>
<para>
PDF file optimization is implemented in the
<filename>QPDF_optimization.cc</filename> source file. That file
is richly commented and serves as the primary reference for the
optimization process.
</para>
<para>
After optimization has been completed, the private member
variables <varname>obj_user_to_objects</varname> and
<varname>object_to_obj_users</varname> in
<classname>QPDF</classname> have been populated. Any object that
has more than one value in the
<varname>object_to_obj_users</varname> table is shared. Any
object that has exactly one value in the
<varname>object_to_obj_users</varname> table is private. To find
all the private objects in a page or a trailer or root dictionary
key, one merely has make this determination for each element in
the <varname>obj_user_to_objects</varname> table for the given
page or key.
</para>
<para>
Note that pages and thumbnails have different object user types,
so the above test on a page will not include objects referenced by
the page's thumbnail dictionary and nothing else.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.linearization.writing">
<title>Writing Linearized Files</title>
<para>
We will create files with only primary hint streams. We will
never write overflow hint streams. (As of PDF version 1.4,
Acrobat doesn't either, and they are never necessary.) The hint
streams contain offset information to objects that point to where
they would be if the hint stream were not present. This means
that we have to calculate all object positions before we can
generate and write the hint table. This means that we have to
generate the file in two passes. To make this reliable,
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> in linearization mode invokes
exactly the same code twice to write the file to a pipeline.
</para>
<para>
In the first pass, the target pipeline is a count pipeline chained
to a discard pipeline. The count pipeline simply passes its data
through to the next pipeline in the chain but can return the
number of bytes passed through it at any intermediate point. The
discard pipeline is an end of line pipeline that just throws its
data away. The hint stream is not written and dummy values with
adequate padding are stored in the first cross reference table,
linearization parameter dictionary, and /Prev key of the first
trailer dictionary. All the offset, length, object renumbering
information, and anything else we need for the second pass is
stored.
</para>
<para>
At the end of the first pass, this information is passed to the
<classname>QPDF</classname> class which constructs a compressed
hint stream in a memory buffer and returns it.
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> uses this information to write a
complete hint stream object into a memory buffer. At this point,
the length of the hint stream is known.
</para>
<para>
In the second pass, the end of the pipeline chain is a regular
file instead of a discard pipeline, and we have known values for
all the offsets and lengths that we didn't have in the first pass.
We have to adjust offsets that appear after the start of the hint
stream by the length of the hint stream, which is known. Anything
that is of variable length is padded, with the padding code
surrounding any writing code that differs in the two passes. This
ensures that changes to the way things are represented never
results in offsets that were gathered during the first pass
becoming incorrect for the second pass.
</para>
<para>
Using this strategy, we can write linearized files to a
non-seekable output stream with only a single pass to disk or
wherever the output is going.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.linearization-data">
<title>Calculating Linearization Data</title>
<para>
Once a file is optimized, we have information about which objects
access which other objects. We can then process these tables to
decide which part (as described in “Linearized PDF Document
Structure” in the PDF specification) each object is
contained within. This tells us the exact order in which objects
are written. The <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> class asks for
this information and enqueues objects for writing in the proper
order. It also turns on a check that causes an exception to be
thrown if an object is encountered that has not already been
queued. (This could happen only if there were a bug in the
traversal code used to calculate the linearization data.)
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.linearization-issues">
<title>Known Issues with Linearization</title>
<para>
There are a handful of known issues with this linearization code.
These issues do not appear to impact the behavior of linearized
files which still work as intended: it is possible for a web
browser to begin to display them before they are fully
downloaded. In fact, it seems that various other programs that
create linearized files have many of these same issues. These
items make reference to terminology used in the linearization
appendix of the PDF specification.
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Thread Dictionary information keys appear in part 4 with the
rest of Threads instead of in part 9. Objects in part 9 are
not grouped together functionally.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
We are not calculating numerators for shared object positions
within content streams or interleaving them within content
streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
We generate only page offset, shared object, and outline hint
tables. It would be relatively easy to add some additional
tables. We gather most of the information needed to create
thumbnail hint tables. There are comments in the code about
this.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.linearization-debugging">
<title>Debugging Note</title>
<para>
The <command>qpdf --show-linearization</command> command can show
the complete contents of linearization hint streams. To look at
the raw data, you can extract the filtered contents of the
linearization hint tables using <command>qpdf --show-object=n
--filtered-stream-data</command>. Then, to convert this into a
bit stream (since linearization tables are bit streams written
without regard to byte boundaries), you can pipe the resulting
data through the following perl code:
<programlisting>use bytes;
binmode STDIN;
undef $/;
my $a = <STDIN>;
my @ch = split(//, $a);
map { printf("%08b", ord($_)) } @ch;
print "\n";
</programlisting>
</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.object-and-xref-streams">
<title>Object and Cross-Reference Streams</title>
<para>
This chapter provides information about the implementation of
object stream and cross-reference stream support in qpdf.
</para>
<sect1 id="ref.object-streams">
<title>Object Streams</title>
<para>
Object streams can contain any regular object except the
following:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
stream objects
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
objects with generation > 0
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
the encryption dictionary
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
objects containing the /Length of another stream
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
In addition, Adobe reader (at least as of version 8.0.0) appears
to not be able to handle having the document catalog appear in an
object stream if the file is encrypted, though this is not
specifically disallowed by the specification.
</para>
<para>
There are additional restrictions for linearized files. See <xref
linkend="ref.object-streams-linearization"/>for details.
</para>
<para>
The PDF specification refers to objects in object streams as
“compressed objects” regardless of whether the object
stream is compressed.
</para>
<para>
The generation number of every object in an object stream must be
zero. It is possible to delete and replace an object in an object
stream with a regular object.
</para>
<para>
The object stream dictionary has the following keys:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/N</literal>: number of objects
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/First</literal>: byte offset of first object
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/Extends</literal>: indirect reference to stream that
this extends
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Stream collections are formed with <literal>/Extends</literal>.
They must form a directed acyclic graph. These can be used for
semantic information and are not meaningful to the PDF document's
syntactic structure. Although qpdf preserves stream collections,
it never generates them and doesn't make use of this information
in any way.
</para>
<para>
The specification recommends limiting the number of objects in
object stream for efficiency in reading and decoding. Acrobat 6
uses no more than 100 objects per object stream for linearized
files and no more 200 objects per stream for non-linearized files.
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname>, in object stream generation
mode, never puts more than 100 objects in an object stream.
</para>
<para>
Object stream contents consists of <emphasis>N</emphasis> pairs of
integers, each of which is the object number and the byte offset
of the object relative to the first object in the stream, followed
by the objects themselves, concatenated.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.xref-streams">
<title>Cross-Reference Streams</title>
<para>
For non-hybrid files, the value following
<literal>startxref</literal> is the byte offset to the xref stream
rather than the word <literal>xref</literal>.
</para>
<para>
For hybrid files (files containing both xref tables and
cross-reference streams), the xref table's trailer dictionary
contains the key <literal>/XRefStm</literal> whose value is the
byte offset to a cross-reference stream that supplements the xref
table. A PDF 1.5-compliant application should read the xref table
first. Then it should replace any object that it has already seen
with any defined in the xref stream. Then it should follow any
<literal>/Prev</literal> pointer in the original xref table's
trailer dictionary. The specification is not clear about what
should be done, if anything, with a <literal>/Prev</literal>
pointer in the xref stream referenced by an xref table. The
<classname>QPDF</classname> class ignores it, which is probably
reasonable since, if this case were to appear for any sensible PDF
file, the previous xref table would probably have a corresponding
<literal>/XRefStm</literal> pointer of its own. For example, if a
hybrid file were appended, the appended section would have its own
xref table and <literal>/XRefStm</literal>. The appended xref
table would point to the previous xref table which would point the
<literal>/XRefStm</literal>, meaning that the new
<literal>/XRefStm</literal> doesn't have to point to it.
</para>
<para>
Since xref streams must be read very early, they may not be
encrypted, and the may not contain indirect objects for keys
required to read them, which are these:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/Type</literal>: value <literal>/XRef</literal>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/Size</literal>: value <emphasis>n+1</emphasis>: where
<emphasis>n</emphasis> is highest object number (same as
<literal>/Size</literal> in the trailer dictionary)
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/Index</literal> (optional): value
<literal>[<replaceable>n count</replaceable> ...]</literal>
used to determine which objects' information is stored in this
stream. The default is <literal>[0 /Size]</literal>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/Prev</literal>: value
<replaceable>offset</replaceable>: byte offset of previous xref
stream (same as <literal>/Prev</literal> in the trailer
dictionary)
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>/W [...]</literal>: sizes of each field in the xref
table
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
The other fields in the xref stream, which may be indirect if
desired, are the union of those from the xref table's trailer
dictionary.
</para>
<sect2 id="ref.xref-stream-data">
<title>Cross-Reference Stream Data</title>
<para>
The stream data is binary and encoded in big-endian byte order.
Entries are concatenated, and each entry has a length equal to
the total of the entries in <literal>/W</literal> above. Each
entry consists of one or more fields, the first of which is the
type of the field. The number of bytes for each field is given
by <literal>/W</literal> above. A 0 in <literal>/W</literal>
indicates that the field is omitted and has the default value.
The default value for the field type is
“<literal>1</literal>”. All other default values are
“<literal>0</literal>”.
</para>
<para>
PDF 1.5 has three field types:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
0: for free objects. Format: <literal>0 obj
next-generation</literal>, same as the free table in a
traditional cross-reference table
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
1: regular non-compressed object. Format: <literal>1 offset
generation</literal>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
2: for objects in object streams. Format: <literal>2
object-stream-number index</literal>, the number of object
stream containing the object and the index within the object
stream of the object.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
It seems standard to have the first entry in the table be
<literal>0 0 0</literal> instead of <literal>0 0 ffff</literal>
if there are no deleted objects.
</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.object-streams-linearization">
<title>Implications for Linearized Files</title>
<para>
For linearized files, the linearization dictionary, document
catalog, and page objects may not be contained in object streams.
</para>
<para>
Objects stored within object streams are given the highest range
of object numbers within the main and first-page cross-reference
sections.
</para>
<para>
It is okay to use cross-reference streams in place of regular xref
tables. There are on special considerations.
</para>
<para>
Hint data refers to object streams themselves, not the objects in
the streams. Shared object references should also be made to the
object streams. There are no reference in any hint tables to the
object numbers of compressed objects (objects within object
streams).
</para>
<para>
When numbering objects, all shared objects within both the first
and second halves of the linearized files must be numbered
consecutively after all normal uncompressed objects in that half.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.object-stream-implementation">
<title>Implementation Notes</title>
<para>
There are three modes for writing object streams:
<option>disable</option>, <option>preserve</option>, and
<option>generate</option>. In disable mode, we do not generate
any object streams, and we also generate an xref table rather than
xref streams. This can be used to generate PDF files that are
viewable with older readers. In preserve mode, we write object
streams such that written object streams contain the same objects
and <literal>/Extends</literal> relationships as in the original
file. This is equal to disable if the file has no object streams.
In generate, we create object streams ourselves by grouping
objects that are allowed in object streams together in sets of no
more than 100 objects. We also ensure that the PDF version is at
least 1.5 in generate mode, but we preserve the version header in
the other modes. The default is <option>preserve</option>.
</para>
<para>
We do not support creation of hybrid files. When we write files,
even in preserve mode, we will lose any xref tables and merge any
appended sections.
</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<appendix id="ref.release-notes">
<title>Release Notes</title>
<para>
For a detailed list of changes, please see the file
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> in the source distribution.
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>3.0.2: September 6, 2012</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: <function>QPDFWriter::setOutputMemory</function> did
not work when not used with
<function>QPDFWriter::setStaticID</function>, which made it
pretty much useless. This has been fixed.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New API call
<function>QPDFWriter::setExtraHeaderText</function> inserts
additional text near the header of the PDF file. The intended
use case is to insert comments that may be consumed by a
downstream application, though other use cases may exist.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>3.0.1: August 11, 2012</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Version 3.0.0 included addition of files for
<command>pkg-config</command>, but this was not mentioned in
the release notes. The release notes for 3.0.0 were updated
to mention this.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: if an object stream ended with a scalar object not
followed by space, qpdf would incorrectly report that it
encountered a premature EOF. This bug has been in qpdf since
version 2.0.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>3.0.0: August 2, 2012</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Acknowledgment: I would like to express gratitude for the
contributions of Tobias Hoffmann toward the release of qpdf
version 3.0. He is responsible for most of the implementation
and design of the new API for manipulating pages, and
contributed code and ideas for many of the improvements made
in version 3.0. Without his work, this release would
certainly not have happened as soon as it did, if at all.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Non-compatible API change:</emphasis> The version of
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::replaceStreamData</function> that
uses a <classname>StreamDataProvider</classname> no longer
requires (or accepts) a <varname>length</varname> parameter.
See <xref linkend="ref.upgrading-to-3.0"/> for an explanation.
While care is taken to avoid non-compatible API changes in
general, an exception was made this time because the new
interface offers an opportunity to significantly simplify
calling code.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Support has been added for large files. The test suite
verifies support for files larger than 4 gigabytes, and manual
testing has verified support for files larger than 10
gigabytes. Large file support is available for both 32-bit
and 64-bit platforms as long as the compiler and underlying
platforms support it.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Support for page selection (splitting and merging PDF files)
has been added to the <command>qpdf</command> command-line
tool. See <xref linkend="ref.page-selection"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Options have been added to the <command>qpdf</command>
command-line tool for copying encryption parameters from
another file. See <xref linkend="ref.basic-options"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New methods have been added to the <classname>QPDF</classname>
object for adding and removing pages. See <xref
linkend="ref.adding-and-remove-pages"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New methods have been added to the <classname>QPDF</classname>
object for copying objects from other PDF files. See <xref
linkend="ref.foreign-objects"/>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A new method <function>QPDFObjectHandle::parse</function> has
been added for constructing
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> objects from a string
description.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Methods have been added to <classname>QPDFWriter</classname>
to allow writing to an already open stdio <type>FILE*</type>
addition to writing to standard output or a named file.
Methods have been added to <classname>QPDF</classname> to be
able to process a file from an already open stdio
<type>FILE*</type>. This makes it possible to read and write
PDF from secure temporary files that have been unlinked prior
to being fully read or written.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <function>QPDF::emptyPDF</function> can be used to allow
creation of PDF files from scratch. The example
<filename>examples/pdf-create.cc</filename> illustrates how it
can be used.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Several methods to take
<classname>PointerHolder<Buffer></classname> can now
also accept <type>std::string</type> arguments.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Many new convenience methods have been added to the library,
most in <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>. See
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> for a full list.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When building on a platform that supports ELF shared libraries
(such as Linux), symbol versions are enabled by default. They
can be disabled by passing
<option>--disable-ld-version-script</option> to
<command>./configure</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The file <filename>libqpdf.pc</filename> is now installed to
support <command>pkg-config</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Image comparison tests are off by default now since they are
not needed to verify a correct build or port of qpdf. They
are needed only when changing the actual PDF output generated
by qpdf. You should enable them if you are making deep
changes to qpdf itself. See <filename>README</filename> for
details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Large file tests are off by default but can be turned on with
<command>./configure</command> or by setting an environment
variable before running the test suite. See
<filename>README</filename> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When qpdf's test suite fails, failures are not printed to the
terminal anymore by default. Instead, find them in
<filename>build/qtest.log</filename>. For packagers who are
building with an autobuilder, you can add the
<option>--enable-show-failed-test-output</option> option to
<command>./configure</command> to restore the old behavior.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.3.1: December 28, 2011</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix thread-safety problem resulting from non-thread-safe use
of the PCRE library.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Made a few minor documentation fixes.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add workaround for a bug that appears in some versions of
ghostscript to the test suite
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix minor build issue for Visual C++ 2010.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.3.0: August 11, 2011</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: when preserving existing encryption on encrypted
files with cleartext metadata, older qpdf versions would
generate password-protected files with no valid password.
This operation now works. This bug only affected files
created by copying existing encryption parameters; explicit
encryption with specification of cleartext metadata worked
before and continues to work.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhance <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> with a new
constructor that allows you to delay the specification of the
output file. When using this constructor, you may now call
<function>QPDFWriter::setOutputFilename</function> to specify
the output file, or you may use
<function>QPDFWriter::setOutputMemory</function> to cause
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> to write the resulting PDF
file to a memory buffer. You may then use
<function>QPDFWriter::getBuffer</function> to retrieve the
memory buffer.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new API call <function>QPDF::replaceObject</function> for
replacing objects by object ID
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new API call <function>QPDF::swapObjects</function> for
swapping two objects by object ID
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>QPDFObjectHandle::getDictAsMap</function> and
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getArrayAsVector</function> to
allow retrieval of dictionary objects as maps and array
objects as vectors.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add functions <function>qpdf_get_info_key</function> and
<function>qpdf_set_info_key</function> to the C API for
manipulating string fields of the document's
<literal>/Info</literal> dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add functions <function>qpdf_init_write_memory</function>,
<function>qpdf_get_buffer_length</function>, and
<function>qpdf_get_buffer</function> to the C API for writing
PDF files to a memory buffer instead of a file.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.2.4: June 25, 2011</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix installation and compilation issues; no functionality
changes.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.2.3: April 30, 2011</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Handle some damaged streams with incorrect characters
following the stream keyword.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Improve handling of inline images when normalizing content
streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhance error recovery to properly handle files that use
object 0 as a regular object, which is specifically disallowed
by the spec.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.2.2: October 4, 2010</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new function <function>qpdf_read_memory</function>
to the C API to call
<function>QPDF::processMemoryFile</function>. This was an
omission in qpdf 2.2.1.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.2.1: October 1, 2010</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method <function>QPDF::setOutputStreams</function>
to replace <varname>std::cout</varname> and
<varname>std::cerr</varname> with other streams for generation
of diagnostic messages and error messages. This can be useful
for GUIs or other applications that want to capture any output
generated by the library to present to the user in some other
way. Note that QPDF does not write to
<varname>std::cout</varname> (or the specified output stream)
except where explicitly mentioned in
<filename>QPDF.hh</filename>, and that the only use of the
error stream is for warnings. Note also that output of
warnings is suppressed when
<literal>setSuppressWarnings(true)</literal> is called.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method <function>QPDF::processMemoryFile</function>
for operating on PDF files that are loaded into memory rather
than in a file on disk.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Give a warning but otherwise ignore empty PDF objects by
treating them as null. Empty object are not permitted by the
PDF specification but have been known to appear in some actual
PDF files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Handle inline image filter abbreviations when the appear as
stream filter abbreviations. The PDF specification does not
allow use of stream filter abbreviations in this way, but
Adobe Reader and some other PDF readers accept them since they
sometimes appear incorrectly in actual PDF files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Implement miscellaneous enhancements to
<classname>PointerHolder</classname> and
<classname>Buffer</classname> to support other changes.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.2.0: August 14, 2010</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new methods to <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>
(<function>newStream</function> and
<function>replaceStreamData</function> for creating new
streams and replacing stream data. This makes it possible to
perform a wide range of operations that were not previously
possible.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new helper method in
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>
(<function>addPageContents</function>) for appending or
prepending new content streams to a page. This method makes
it possible to manipulate content streams without having to be
concerned whether a page's contents are a single stream or an
array of streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method in <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>:
<function>replaceOrRemoveKey</function>, which replaces a
dictionary key
with a given value unless the value is null, in which case it
removes the key instead.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method in <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>:
<function>getRawStreamData</function>, which returns the raw
(unfiltered) stream data into a buffer. This complements the
<function>getStreamData</function> method, which returns the
filtered (uncompressed) stream data and can only be used when
the stream's data is filterable.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Provide two new examples:
<command>pdf-double-page-size</command> and
<command>pdf-invert-images</command> that illustrate the newly
added interfaces.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix a memory leak that would cause loss of a few bytes for
every object involved in a cycle of object references. Thanks
to Jian Ma for calling my attention to the leak.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.1.5: April 25, 2010</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Remove restriction of file identifier strings to 16 bytes.
This unnecessary restriction was preventing qpdf from being
able to encrypt or decrypt files with identifier strings that
were not exactly 16 bytes long. The specification imposes no
such restriction.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.1.4: April 18, 2010</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Apply the same padding calculation fix from version 2.1.2 to
the main cross reference stream as well.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Since <command>qpdf --check</command> only performs limited
checks, clarify the output to make it clear that there still
may be errors that qpdf can't check. This should make it less
surprising to people when another PDF reader is unable to read
a file that qpdf thinks is okay.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.1.3: March 27, 2010</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix bug that could cause a failure when rewriting PDF files
that contain object streams with unreferenced objects that in
turn reference indirect scalars.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Don't complain about (invalid) AES streams that aren't a
multiple of 16 bytes. Instead, pad them before decrypting.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.1.2: January 24, 2010</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix bug in padding around first half cross reference stream in
linearized files. The bug could cause an assertion failure
when linearizing certain unlucky files.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.1.1: December 14, 2009</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
No changes in functionality; insert missing include in an
internal library header file to support gcc 4.4, and update
test suite to ignore broken Adobe Reader installations.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.1: October 30, 2009</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
This is the first version of qpdf to include Windows support.
On Windows, it is possible to build a DLL. Additionally, a
partial C-language API has been introduced, which makes it
possible to call qpdf functions from non-C++ environments. I
am very grateful to <!-- Žarko Gajić --> Zarko Gagic (<ulink
url="http://delphi.about.com/">http://delphi.about.com/</ulink>)
for tirelessly testing numerous pre-release versions of this
DLL and providing many excellent suggestions on improving the
interface.
</para>
<para>
For programming to the C interface, please see the header file
<filename>qpdf/qpdf-c.h</filename> and the example
<filename>examples/pdf-linearize.c</filename>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Zarko Gajic has written a Delphi wrapper for qpdf, which can
be downloaded from qpdf's download side. Zarko's Delphi
wrapper is released with the same licensing terms as qpdf
itself and comes with this disclaimer: “Delphi wrapper
unit <filename>qpdf.pas</filename> created by Zarko Gajic
(<ulink
url="http://delphi.about.com/">http://delphi.about.com/</ulink>).
Use at your own risk and for whatever purpose you want. No
support is provided. Sample code is provided.”
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Support has been added for AES encryption and crypt filters.
Although qpdf does not presently support files that use
PKI-based encryption, with the addition of AES and crypt
filters, qpdf is now be able to open most encrypted files
created with newer versions of Acrobat or other PDF creation
software. Note that I have not been able to get very many
files encrypted in this way, so it's possible there could
still be some cases that qpdf can't handle. Please report
them if you find them.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Many error messages have been improved to include more
information in hopes of making qpdf a more useful tool for PDF
experts to use in manually recovering damaged PDF files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Attempt to avoid compressing metadata streams if possible.
This is consistent with other PDF creation applications.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Provide new command-line options for AES encrypt, cleartext
metadata, and setting the minimum and forced PDF versions of
output files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add additional methods to the <classname>QPDF</classname>
object for querying the document's permissions. Although qpdf
does not enforce these permissions, it does make them
available so that applications that use qpdf can enforce
permissions.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--check</option> option to <command>qpdf</command>
has been extended to include some additional information.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
There have been a handful of non-compatible API changes. For
details, see <xref linkend="ref.upgrading-to-2.1"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.0.6: May 3, 2009</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Do not attempt to uncompress streams that have decode
parameters we don't recognize. Earlier versions of qpdf would
have rejected files with such streams.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.0.5: March 10, 2009</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Improve error handling in the LZW decoder, and fix a small
error introduced in the previous version with regard to
handling full tables. The LZW decoder has been more strongly
verified in this release.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.0.4: February 21, 2009</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Include proper support for LZW streams encoded without the
“early code change” flag. Special thanks to Atom
Smasher who reported the problem and provided an input file
compressed in this way, which I did not previously have.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Implement some improvements to file recovery logic.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.0.3: February 15, 2009</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Compile cleanly with gcc 4.4.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Handle strings encoded as UTF-16BE properly.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.0.2: June 30, 2008</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Update test suite to work properly with a
non-<command>bash</command> <filename>/bin/sh</filename> and
with Perl 5.10. No changes were made to the actual qpdf
source code itself for this release.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.0.1: May 6, 2008</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
No changes in functionality or interface. This release
includes fixes to the source code so that qpdf compiles
properly and passes its test suite on a broader range of
platforms. See <filename>ChangeLog</filename> in the source
distribution for details.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>2.0: April 29, 2008</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
First public release.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</appendix>
<appendix id="ref.upgrading-to-2.1">
<title>Upgrading from 2.0 to 2.1</title>
<para>
Although, as a general rule, we like to avoid introducing
source-level incompatibilities in qpdf's interface, there were a
few non-compatible changes made in this version. A considerable
amount of source code that uses qpdf will probably compile without
any changes, but in some cases, you may have to update your code.
The changes are enumerated here. There are also some new
interfaces; for those, please refer to the header files.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF's exception handling mechanism now uses
<classname>std::logic_error</classname> for internal errors and
<classname>std::runtime_error</classname> for runtime errors in
favor of the now removed <classname>QEXC</classname> classes used
in previous versions. The <classname>QEXC</classname> exception
classes predated the addition of the
<filename><stdexcept></filename> header file to the C++
standard library. Most of the exceptions thrown by the qpdf
library itself are still of type <classname>QPDFExc</classname>
which is now derived from
<classname>std::runtime_error</classname>. Programs that caught
an instance of <classname>std::exception</classname> and
displayed it by calling the <function>what()</function> method
will not need to be changed.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <classname>QPDFExc</classname> class now internally
represents various fields of the error condition and provides
interfaces for querying them. Among the fields is a numeric
error code that can help applications act differently on (a small
number of) different error conditions. See
<filename>QPDFExc.hh</filename> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Warnings can be retrieved from qpdf as instances of
<classname>QPDFExc</classname> instead of strings.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The nested <classname>QPDF::EncryptionData</classname> class's
constructor takes an additional argument. This class is
primarily intended to be used by
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname>. There's not really anything
useful an end-user application could do with it. It probably
shouldn't really be part of the public interface to begin with.
Likewise, some of the methods for computing internal encryption
dictionary parameters have changed to support
<literal>/R=4</literal> encryption.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The method <function>QPDF::getUserPassword</function> has been
removed since it didn't do what people would think it did. There
are now two new methods:
<function>QPDF::getPaddedUserPassword</function> and
<function>QPDF::getTrimmedUserPassword</function>. The first one
does what the old <function>QPDF::getUserPassword</function>
method used to do, which is to return the password with possible
binary padding as specified by the PDF specification. The second
one returns a human-readable password string.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The enumerated types that used to be nested in
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> have moved to top-level
enumerated types and are now defined in the file
<filename>qpdf/Constants.h</filename>. This enables them to be
shared by both the C and C++ interfaces.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</appendix>
<appendix id="ref.upgrading-to-3.0">
<title>Upgrading to 3.0</title>
<para>
For the most part, the API for qpdf version 3.0 is backward
compatible with versions 2.1 and later. There are two exceptions:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The method
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::replaceStreamData</function> that
uses a <classname>StreamDataProvider</classname> to provide the
stream data no longer takes a <varname>length</varname>
parameter. While it would have been easy enough to keep the
parameter for backward compatibility, in this case, the
parameter was removed since this provides the user an
opportunity to simplify the calling code. This method was
introduced in version 2.2. At the time, the
<varname>length</varname> parameter was required in order to
ensure that calls to the stream data provider returned the same
length for a specific stream every time they were invoked. In
particular, the linearization code depends on this. Instead,
qpdf 3.0 and newer check for that constraint explicitly. The
first time the stream data provider is called for a specific
stream, the actual length is saved, and subsequent calls are
required to return the same number of bytes. This means the
calling code no longer has to compute the length in advance,
which can be a significant simplification. If your code fails
to compile because of the extra argument and you don't want to
make other changes to your code, just omit the argument.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Many methods take <type>long long</type> instead of other
integer types. Most if not all existing code should compile
fine with this change since such parameters had always
previously been smaller types. This change was required to
support files larger than two gigabytes in size.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</appendix>
</book>
|