A minimal PDF
Two identical pages carrying the bones of an invoice in plain shapes, and not a word of text: a file of a dozen kilobytes, with no font embedded.
A page set in a font from 1990
A print shop that has been buying fonts for twenty years owns a collection in Adobe's first font format, bought and paid for, that almost nothing reads any more. Replacing it means buying the same fonts a second time and accepting that a reprint will not quite match the original run. This engine reads that collection, so it keeps working instead of becoming a reason to change nothing.
Everything the page says about that font — its name, how many shapes it carries, the rectangle they stand in, the thickness of a downstroke, where an underline belongs — was read out of the font itself as the page was being drawn, so the page cannot describe a font other than the one it is set in. It also says plainly what this old kind costs: it travels whole, where every other kind travels only the letters actually used.
What this example shows
- A font from 1990, read and carried into the file whole.
- Every width read from the letter's own glyph: no side file needed.
- What the font says about itself, printed on the page it drew.
The source code, complete
Nothing is left out and nothing is simplified: this is the program exactly as it runs, for the developer who uses this library. The third is the description itself: a plain list of what the page has to say, which is what the service is sent.
Read the Rust source Read the Python source Read the JSON source
The document itself
Examples near this one
Showing page one before the file has arrived
The same document written twice, the ordinary way and with its first page moved to the head of the file, with how much of each must arrive before page one appears.
Making the file smaller
The same document written twice, plainly and packed, with what each one weighs and what the packing saved.
A document that reads freely and asks not to be copied
A page that opens with nothing typed and prints like any other, and that asks the reading software to leave its text where it is. Every word of it is scrambled inside the file.
A document that asks for a password before it opens
A page nothing shows until its password is typed in: no first line, no preview, no picture of it anywhere. The password is given on the example's page, to be tried.
Fonts embedded in the file
Text set in a font embedded in the file, cut down to the letters actually used, and still searchable, copyable and readable aloud.