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.
A minimal PDF
Open this one first. Two pages, identical, each carrying the bones of an invoice — a coloured band across the top, a frame around everything, and two dozen empty rectangles where the lines of a table would go — and not a word of text anywhere on either. That is the whole of what a document needs in order to exist: pages, and marks on them. There are two rather than one because putting the second in costs a single instruction, and that is worth seeing at the outset. Everything else shown on this site is built on top of this, never instead of it.
It is also the document to try out on other people's machines before anything larger rides on the answer. Send it to a colleague, open it on a telephone, hand it to whoever looks after your computers: it is small enough to travel in an email and plain enough that it opens in anything with a screen. And it is light: ten thousand copies of it still fit on a memory stick with room left over.
What this example shows
- A coloured band across the top of each page, and a frame round all.
- Two dozen empty rectangles, stacked, where a table's lines would go.
- Shapes and nothing but shapes, so the file carries no font at all.
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
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.
Letters you draw yourself
A tick, a cross and a dash drawn by the program, added to the document as a font, and set among ordinary words.