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PDF20 Spec 09 General
Part of: PDF20-Spec-09-Text
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9 Text 9.1
General
This clause describes the special facilities in PDF for dealing with text — specifically, for representing characters with glyphs from fonts. A glyph is a graphical shape and is subject to all graphical manipulations, such as coordinate transformation. Because of the importance of text in most page descriptions, PDF provides higher-level facilities to describe, select, and render glyphs conveniently and efficiently. The first subclause is a general description of how glyphs from fonts are painted on the page. Subsequent subclauses cover these topics in detail: Text state. A subset of the graphics state parameters pertain to text, including parameters that select the font, scale the glyphs to an appropriate size, and accomplish other graphical effects. Text objects and operators. The text operators specify the glyphs to be painted, represented by string objects whose values shall be interpreted as sequences of character codes. A text object encloses a sequence of text operators and associated parameters. Font data structures. Font dictionaries and associated data structures provide information that a PDF processor needs to interpret the text and position the glyphs properly. The definitions of the glyphs themselves shall be contained in font programs, which may be embedded in the PDF file, built into a PDF processor, or obtained from an external font program.
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