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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<!DOCTYPE book [
<!ENTITY ldquo "&#x201C;">
<!ENTITY rdquo "&#x201D;">
<!ENTITY mdash "&#x2014;">
<!ENTITY ndash "&#x2013;">
<!ENTITY nbsp "&#xA0;">
<!ENTITY swversion "10.3.2">
<!ENTITY lastreleased "May 8, 2021">
]>
<book>
<bookinfo>
<title>QPDF Manual</title>
<subtitle>For QPDF Version &swversion;, &lastreleased;</subtitle>
<author>
<firstname>Jay</firstname><surname>Berkenbilt</surname>
</author>
<copyright>
<year>2005&ndash;2020</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="https://qpdf.sourceforge.io/">https://qpdf.sourceforge.io/</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 is licensed under <ulink
url="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0">the Apache
License, Version 2.0</ulink> (the "License"). Unless required by
applicable law or agreed to in writing, software distributed under
the License is distributed on an "AS IS" BASIS, WITHOUT WARRANTIES
OR CONDITIONS OF ANY KIND, either express or implied. See the
License for the specific language governing permissions and
limitations under the License.
</para>
<para>
Versions of qpdf prior to version 7 were released under the terms
of <ulink url="https://opensource.org/licenses/Artistic-2.0">the
Artistic License, version 2.0</ulink>. At your option, you may
continue to consider qpdf to be licensed under those terms. The
Apache License 2.0 permits everything that the Artistic License 2.0
permits but is slightly less restrictive. Allowing the Artistic
License to continue being used is primary to help people who may
have to get specific approval to use qpdf in their products.
</para>
<para>
QPDF is intentionally released with a permissive license. However,
if there is some reason that the licensing terms don't work for
your requirements, please feel free to contact the copyright holder
to make other arrangements.
</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.md</filename> and
<filename>INSTALL</filename> files in the source distribution.
</para>
<sect1 id="ref.prerequisites">
<title>System Requirements</title>
<para>
The qpdf package has few external dependencies. In order to build
qpdf, the following packages are required:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
A C++ compiler that supports C++-14.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
zlib: <ulink url="http://www.zlib.net/">http://www.zlib.net/</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
jpeg: <ulink
url="http://www.ijg.org/files/">http://www.ijg.org/files/</ulink>
or <ulink
url="https://libjpeg-turbo.org/">https://libjpeg-turbo.org/</ulink>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Recommended but not required:</emphasis> gnutls:
<ulink url="https://www.gnutls.org/">https://www.gnutls.org/</ulink>
to be able to use the gnutls crypto provider, and/or openssl:
<ulink url="https://openssl.org/">https://openssl.org/</ulink>
to be able to use the openssl crypto provider.
</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 running the test suite. Starting with qpdf version
9.1.1, perl is no longer required at runtime.
</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>
</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>
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.md</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.md</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.md</filename>.
</para>
<para>
While <type>wchar_t</type> is part of the C++ standard, qpdf uses
it in only one place in the public API, and it's just in a helper
function. It is possible to build qpdf on a system that doesn't
have <type>wchar_t</type>, and it's also possible to compile a
program that uses qpdf on a system without <type>wchar_t</type> as
long as you don't call that one method. This is a very unusual
situation. For a detailed discussion, please see the top-level
README.md file in qpdf's source distribution.
</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>
<sect1 id="ref.crypto">
<title>Crypto Providers</title>
<para>
Starting with qpdf 9.1.0, the qpdf library can be built with
multiple implementations of providers of cryptographic functions,
which we refer to as &ldquo;crypto providers.&rdquo; At the time
of writing, a crypto implementation must provide MD5 and SHA2
(256, 384, and 512-bit) hashes and RC4 and AES256 with and without
CBC encryption. In the future, if digital signature is added to
qpdf, there may be additional requirements beyond this.
</para>
<para>
Starting with qpdf version 9.1.0, the available implementations
are <literal>native</literal> and <literal>gnutls</literal>. In
qpdf 10.0.0, <literal>openssl</literal> was added. Additional
implementations may be added if needed. It is also possible for a
developer to provide their own implementation without modifying
the qpdf library.
</para>
<sect2 id="ref.crypto.build">
<title>Build Support For Crypto Providers</title>
<para>
When building with qpdf's build system, crypto providers can be
enabled at build time using various
<command>./configure</command> options. The default behavior is
for <command>./configure</command> to discover which crypto
providers can be supported based on available external libraries,
to build all available crypto providers, and to use an external
provider as the default over the native one. This behavior can be
changed with the following flags to
<command>./configure</command>:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--enable-crypto-<replaceable>x</replaceable></option>
(where <replaceable>x</replaceable> is a supported crypto
provider): enable the <replaceable>x</replaceable> crypto
provider, requiring any external dependencies it needs
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--disable-crypto-<replaceable>x</replaceable></option>:
disable the <replaceable>x</replaceable> provider, and do not
link against its dependencies even if they are available
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--with-default-crypto=<replaceable>x</replaceable></option>:
make <replaceable>x</replaceable> the default provider even if
a higher priority one is available
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--disable-implicit-crypto</option>: only build crypto
providers that are explicitly requested with an
<option>--enable-crypto-<replaceable>x</replaceable></option>
option
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
For example, if you want to guarantee that the gnutls crypto
provider is used and that the native provider is not built, you
could run <command>./configure --enable-crypto-gnutls
--disable-implicit-crypto</command>.
</para>
<para>
If you build qpdf using your own build system, in order for qpdf
to work at all, you need to enable at least one crypto provider.
The file <filename>libqpdf/qpdf/qpdf-config.h.in</filename>
provides macros <literal>DEFAULT_CRYPTO</literal>, whose value
must be a string naming the default crypto provider, and various
symbols starting with <literal>USE_CRYPTO_</literal>, at least
one of which has to be enabled. Additionally, you must compile
the source files that implement a crypto provider. To get a list
of those files, look at <filename>libqpdf/build.mk</filename>. If
you want to omit a particular crypto provider, as long as its
<literal>USE_CRYPTO_</literal> symbol is undefined, you can
completely ignore the source files that belong to a particular
crypto provider. Additionally, crypto providers may have their
own external dependencies that can be omitted if the crypto
provider is not used. For example, if you are building qpdf
yourself and are using an environment that does not support
gnutls or openssl, you can ensure that
<literal>USE_CRYPTO_NATIVE</literal> is defined,
<literal>USE_CRYPTO_GNUTLS</literal> is not defined, and
<literal>DEFAULT_CRYPTO</literal> is defined to
<literal>"native"</literal>. Then you must include the source
files used in the native implementation, some of which were added
or renamed from earlier versions, to your build, and you can
ignore <filename>QPDFCrypto_gnutls.cc</filename>. Always consult
<filename>libqpdf/build.mk</filename> to get the list of source
files you need to build.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="ref.crypto.runtime">
<title>Runtime Crypto Provider Selection</title>
<para>
You can use the <option>--show-crypto</option> option to
<command>qpdf</command> to get a list of available crypto
providers. The default provider is always listed first, and the
rest are listed in lexical order. Each crypto provider is listed
on a line by itself with no other text, enabling the output of
this command to be used easily in scripts.
</para>
<para>
You can override which crypto provider is used by setting the
<literal>QPDF_CRYPTO_PROVIDER</literal> environment variable.
There are few reasons to ever do this, but you might want to do
it if you were explicitly trying to compare behavior of two
different crypto providers while testing performance or
reproducing a bug. It could also be useful for people who are
implementing their own crypto providers.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="ref.crypto.develop">
<title>Crypto Provider Information for Developers</title>
<para>
If you are writing code that uses libqpdf and you want to force a
certain crypto provider to be used, you can call the method
<function>QPDFCryptoProvider::setDefaultProvider</function>. The
argument is the name of a built-in or developer-supplied
provider. To add your own crypto provider, you have to create a
class derived from <classname>QPDFCryptoImpl</classname> and
register it with <classname>QPDFCryptoProvider</classname>. For
additional information, see comments in
<filename>include/qpdf/QPDFCryptoImpl.hh</filename>.
</para>
</sect2>
<sect2 id="ref.crypto.design">
<title>Crypto Provider Design Notes</title>
<para>
This section describes a few bits of rationale for why the crypto
provider interface was set up the way it was. You don't need to
know any of this information, but it's provided for the record
and in case it's interesting.
</para>
<para>
As a general rule, I want to avoid as much as possible including
large blocks of code that are conditionally compiled such that,
in most builds, some code is never built. This is dangerous
because it makes it very easy for invalid code to creep in
unnoticed. As such, I want it to be possible to build qpdf with
all available crypto providers, and this is the way I build qpdf
for local development. At the same time, if a particular packager
feels that it is a security liability for qpdf to use crypto
functionality from other than a library that gets considerable
scrutiny for this specific purpose (such as gnutls, openssl, or
nettle), then I want to give that packager the ability to
completely disable qpdf's native implementation. Or if someone
wants to avoid adding a dependency on one of the external crypto
providers, I don't want the availability of the provider to
impose additional external dependencies within that environment.
Both of these are situations that I know to be true for some
users of qpdf.
</para>
<para>
I want registration and selection of crypto providers to be
thread-safe, and I want it to work deterministically for a
developer to provide their own crypto provider and be able to set
it up as the default. This was the primary motivation behind
requiring C++-11 as doing so enabled me to exploit the guaranteed
thread safety of local block static initialization. The
<classname>QPDFCryptoProvider</classname> class uses a singleton
pattern with thread-safe initialization to create the singleton
instance of <classname>QPDFCryptoProvider</classname> and exposes
only static methods in its public interface. In this way, if a
developer wants to call any
<classname>QPDFCryptoProvider</classname> methods, the library
guarantees the <classname>QPDFCryptoProvider</classname> is fully
initialized and all built-in crypto providers are registered.
Making <classname>QPDFCryptoProvider</classname> actually know
about all the built-in providers may seem a bit sad at first, but
this choice makes it extremely clear exactly what the
initialization behavior is. There's no question about provider
implementations automatically registering themselves in a
nondeterministic order. It also means that implementations do not
need to know anything about the provider interface, which makes
them easier to test in isolation. Another advantage of this
approach is that a developer who wants to develop their own
crypto provider can do so in complete isolation from the qpdf
library and, with just two calls, can make qpdf use their
provider in their application. If they decided to contribute
their code, plugging it into the qpdf library would require a
very small change to qpdf's source code.
</para>
<para>
The decision to make the crypto provider selectable at runtime
was one I struggled with a little, but I decided to do it for
various reasons. Allowing an end user to switch crypto providers
easily could be very useful for reproducing a potential bug. If a
user reports a bug that some cryptographic thing is broken, I can
easily ask that person to try with the
<literal>QPDF_CRYPTO_PROVIDER</literal> variable set to different
values. The same could apply in the event of a performance
problem. This also makes it easier for qpdf's own test suite to
exercise code with different providers without having to make
every program that links with qpdf aware of the possibility of
multiple providers. In qpdf's continuous integration environment,
the entire test suite is run for each supported crypto provider.
This is made simple by being able to select the provider using an
environment variable.
</para>
<para>
Finally, making crypto providers selectable in this way establish
a pattern that I may follow again in the future for stream filter
providers. One could imagine a future enhancement where someone
could provide their own implementations for basic filters like
<literal>/FlateDecode</literal> or for other filters that qpdf
doesn't support. Implementing the registration functions and
internal storage of registered providers was also easier using
C++-11's functional interfaces, which was another reason to
require C++-11 at this time.
</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.packaging">
<title>Notes for Packagers</title>
<para>
If you are packaging qpdf for an operating system distribution,
here are some things you may want to keep in mind:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Starting in qpdf version 9.1.1, qpdf no longer has a runtime
dependency on perl. This is because fix-qdf was rewritten in
C++. However, qpdf still has a build-time dependency on perl.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Make sure you are getting the intended behavior with regard to
crypto providers. Read <xref linkend="ref.crypto.build"/> for
details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Passing <option>--enable-show-failed-test-output</option> to
<command>./configure</command> will cause any failed test
output to be written to the console. This can be very useful
for seeing test failures generated by autobuilders where you
can't access qtest.log after the fact.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If qpdf's build environment detects the presence of autoconf
and related tools, it will check to ensure that automatically
generated files are up-to-date with recorded checksums and fail
if it detects a discrepancy. This feature is intended to
prevent you from accidentally forgetting to regenerate
automatic files after modifying their sources. If your
packaging environment automatically refreshes automatic files,
it can cause this check to fail. Suppress qpdf's checks by
passing <option>--disable-check-autofiles</option> to
<command>/.configure</command>. This is safe since qpdf's
<command>autogen.sh</command> just runs autotools in the normal
way.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF's <command>make install</command> does not install
completion files by default, but as a packager, it's good if
you install them wherever your distribution expects such files
to go. You can find completion files to install in the
<filename>completions</filename> directory.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Packagers are encouraged to install the source files from the
<filename>examples</filename> directory along with qpdf
development packages.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</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>
If <option>@filename</option> appears as a word anywhere in the
command-line, it will be read line by line, and each line will be
treated as a command-line argument. The <option>@-</option> option
allows arguments to be read from standard input. This allows qpdf
to be invoked with an arbitrary number of arbitrarily long
arguments. It is also very useful for avoiding having to pass
passwords on the command line. Note that the
<option>@filename</option> can't appear in the middle of an
argument, so constructs such as <option>--arg=@option</option>
will not work. You would have to include the argument and its
options together in the arguments file.
</para>
<para>
<option>outfilename</option> does not have to be seekable, even
when generating linearized files. Specifying
&ldquo;<option>-</option>&rdquo; as <option>outfilename</option>
means to write to standard output. If you want to overwrite the
input file with the output, use the option
<option>--replace-input</option> and omit the output file name.
You can't specify the same file as both the input and the output.
If you do this, qpdf will tell you about the
<option>--replace-input</option> option.
</para>
<para>
Most options require an output file, but some testing or
inspection commands do not. These are specifically noted.
</para>
<sect2 id="ref.exit-status">
<title>Exit Status</title>
<para>
The exit status of <command>qpdf</command> may be interpreted as
follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>0</literal>: no errors or warnings were found. The
file may still have problems qpdf can't detect. If
<option>--warning-exit-0</option> was specified, exit status 0
is used even if there are warnings.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>2</literal>: errors were found. qpdf was not able to
fully process the file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>3</literal>: qpdf encountered problems that it was
able to recover from. In some cases, the resulting file may
still be damaged. Note that qpdf still exits with status
<literal>3</literal> if it finds warnings even when
<option>--no-warn</option> is specified. With
<option>--warning-exit-0</option>, warnings without errors
exit with status 0 instead of 3.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
Note that <command>qpdf</command> never exists with status
<literal>1</literal>. If you get an exit status of
<literal>1</literal>, it was something else, like the shell not
being able to find or execute <command>qpdf</command>.
</para>
</sect2>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.shell-completion">
<title>Shell Completion</title>
<para>
Starting in qpdf version 8.3.0, qpdf provides its own completion
support for zsh and bash. You can enable bash completion with
<command>eval $(qpdf --completion-bash)</command> and zsh
completion with <command>eval $(qpdf --completion-zsh)</command>.
If <command>qpdf</command> is not in your path, you should invoke
it above with an absolute path. If you invoke it with a relative
path, it will warn you, and the completion won't work if you're in
a different directory.
</para>
<para>
qpdf will use <literal>argv[0]</literal> to figure out where its
executable is. This may produce unwanted results in some cases,
especially if you are trying to use completion with copy of qpdf
that is built from source. You can specify a full path to the qpdf
you want to use for completion in the
<literal>QPDF_EXECUTABLE</literal> environment variable.
</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>--help</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Display command-line invocation help.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--version</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Display the current version of qpdf.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--copyright</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Show detailed copyright information.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--show-crypto</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Show a list of available crypto providers, each on a line by
itself. The default provider is always listed first. See <xref
linkend="ref.crypto"/> for more information about crypto
providers.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--completion-bash</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Output a completion command you can eval to enable shell
completion from bash.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--completion-zsh</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Output a completion command you can eval to enable shell
completion from zsh.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--password=<replaceable>password</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Specifies a password for accessing encrypted files. To read
the password from a file or standard input, you can use
<option>--password-file</option>, added in qpdf 10.2. Note
that you can also use <option>@filename</option> or
<option>@-</option> as described above to put the password in
a file or pass it via standard input, but you would do so by
specifying the entire
<option>--password=<replaceable>password</replaceable></option>
option in the file. Syntax such as
<option>--password=@filename</option> won't work since
<option>@filename</option> is not recognized in the middle of
an argument.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--password-file=<replaceable>filename</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Reads the first line from the specified file and uses it as
the password for accessing encrypted files.
<option><replaceable>filename</replaceable></option> may be
<literal>-</literal> to read the password from standard input.
Note that, in this case, the password is echoed and there is
no prompt, so use with caution.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--is-encrypted</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Silently exit with status 0 if the file is encrypted or status
2 if the file is not encrypted. This is useful for shell
scripts. Other options are ignored if this is given. This
option is mutually exclusive with
<option>--requires-password</option>. Both this option and
<option>--requires-password</option> exit with status 2 for
non-encrypted files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--requires-password</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Silently exit with status 0 if a password (other than as
supplied) is required. Exit with status 2 if the file is not
encrypted. Exit with status 3 if the file is encrypted but
requires no password or the correct password has been
supplied. This is useful for shell scripts. Note that any
supplied password is used when opening the file. When used
with a <option>--password</option> option, this option can be
used to check the correctness of the password. In that case,
an exit status of 3 means the file works with the supplied
password. This option is mutually exclusive with
<option>--is-encrypted</option>. Both this option and
<option>--is-encrypted</option> exit with status 2 for
non-encrypted files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--verbose</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Increase verbosity of output. For now, this just prints some
indication of any file that it creates.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--progress</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Indicate progress while writing files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--no-warn</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Suppress writing of warnings to stderr. If warnings were
detected and suppressed, <command>qpdf</command> will still
exit with exit code 3. See also
<option>--warning-exit-0</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--warning-exit-0</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If warnings are found but no errors, exit with exit code 0
instead 3. When combined with <option>--no-warn</option>, the
effect is for <command>qpdf</command> to completely ignore
warnings.
</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>--replace-input</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If specified, the output file name should be omitted. This
option tells qpdf to replace the input file with the output.
It does this by writing to
<filename><replaceable>infilename</replaceable>.~qpdf-temp#</filename>
and, when done, overwriting the input file with the temporary
file. If there were any warnings, the original input is saved
as
<filename><replaceable>infilename</replaceable>.~qpdf-orig</filename>.
</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>--encryption-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>--encryption-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>--allow-weak-crypto</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Starting with version 10.4, qpdf issues warnings when
requested to create files using RC4 encryption. This option
suppresses those warnings. In future versions of qpdf, qpdf
will refuse to create files with weak cryptography when this
flag is not given. See <xref linkend="ref.weak-crypto"/> for
additional details.
</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>--password-is-hex-key</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Overrides the usual computation/retrieval of the PDF file's
encryption key from user/owner password with an explicit
specification of the encryption key. When this option is
specified, the argument to the <option>--password</option>
option is interpreted as a hexadecimal-encoded key value. This
only applies to the password used to open the main input file.
It does not apply to other files opened by
<option>--pages</option> or other options or to files being
written.
</para>
<para>
Most users will never have a need for this option, and no
standard viewers support this mode of operation, but it can be
useful for forensic or investigatory purposes. For example, if
a PDF file is encrypted with an unknown password, a
brute-force attack using the key directly is sometimes more
efficient than one using the password. Also, if a file is
heavily damaged, it may be possible to derive the encryption
key and recover parts of the file using it directly. To expose
the encryption key used by an encrypted file that you can open
normally, use the <option>--show-encryption-key</option>
option.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--suppress-password-recovery</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Ordinarily, qpdf attempts to automatically compensate for
passwords specified in the wrong character encoding. This
option suppresses that behavior. Under normal conditions,
there are no reasons to use this option. See <xref
linkend="ref.unicode-passwords"/> for a discussion
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--password-mode=<replaceable>mode</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option can be used to fine-tune how qpdf interprets
Unicode (non-ASCII) password strings passed on the command
line. With the exception of the <option>hex-bytes</option>
mode, these only apply to passwords provided when encrypting
files. The <option>hex-bytes</option> mode also applies to
passwords specified for reading files. For additional
discussion of the supported password modes and when you might
want to use them, see <xref linkend="ref.unicode-passwords"/>.
The following modes are supported:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>auto</option>: Automatically determine whether the
specified password is a properly encoded Unicode (UTF-8)
string, and transcode it as required by the PDF spec based
on the type encryption being applied. On Windows starting
with version 8.4.0, and on almost all other modern
platforms, incoming passwords will be properly encoded in
UTF-8, so this is almost always what you want.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>unicode</option>: Tells qpdf that the incoming
password is UTF-8, overriding whatever its automatic
detection determines. The only difference between this mode
and <option>auto</option> is that qpdf will fail with an
error message if the password is not valid UTF-8 instead of
falling back to <option>bytes</option> mode with a warning.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>bytes</option>: Interpret the password as a literal
byte string. For non-Windows platforms, this is what
versions of qpdf prior to 8.4.0 did. For Windows platforms,
there is no way to specify strings of binary data on the
command line directly, but you can use the
<option>@filename</option> option to do it, in which case
this option forces qpdf to respect the string of bytes as
provided. This option will allow you to encrypt PDF files
with passwords that will not be usable by other readers.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>hex-bytes</option>: Interpret the password as a
hex-encoded string. This provides a way to pass binary data
as a password on all platforms including Windows. As with
<option>bytes</option>, this option may allow creation of
files that can't be opened by other readers. This mode
affects qpdf's interpretation of passwords specified for
decrypting files as well as for encrypting them. It makes
it possible to specify strings that are encoded in some
manner other than the system's default encoding.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--rotate=[+|-]angle[:page-range]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Apply rotation to specified pages. The
<option>page-range</option> portion of the option value has
the same format as page ranges in <xref
linkend="ref.page-selection"/>. If the page range is omitted,
the rotation is applied to all pages. The
<option>angle</option> portion of the parameter may be either
0, 90, 180, or 270. If preceded by <option>+</option> or
<option>-</option>, the angle is added to or subtracted from
the specified pages' original rotations. This is almost always
what you want. Otherwise the pages' rotations are set to the
exact value, which may cause the appearances of the pages to
be inconsistent, especially for scans. For example, the
command <command>qpdf in.pdf out.pdf --rotate=+90:2,4,6
--rotate=180:7-8</command> would rotate pages 2, 4, and 6 90
degrees clockwise from their original rotation and force the
rotation of pages 7 through 8 to 180 degrees regardless of
their original rotation, and the command <command>qpdf in.pdf
out.pdf --rotate=+180</command> would rotate all pages by 180
degrees.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--keep-files-open=<replaceable>[yn]</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option controls whether qpdf keeps individual files open
while merging. Prior to version 8.1.0, qpdf always kept all
files open, but this meant that the number of files that could
be merged was limited by the operating system's open file
limit. Version 8.1.0 opened files as they were referenced and
closed them after each read, but this caused a major
performance impact. Version 8.2.0 optimized the performance
but did so in a way that, for local file systems, there was a
small but unavoidable performance hit, but for networked file
systems, the performance impact could be very high. Starting
with version 8.2.1, the default behavior is that files are
kept open if no more than 200 files are specified, but that
the behavior can be explicitly overridden with the
<option>--keep-files-open</option> flag. If you are merging
more than 200 files but less than the operating system's max
open files limit, you may want to use
<option>--keep-files-open=y</option>, especially if working
over a networked file system. If you are using a local file
system where the overhead is low and you might sometimes merge
more than the OS limit's number of files from a script and are
not worried about a few seconds additional processing time,
you may want to specify <option>--keep-files-open=n</option>.
The threshold for switching may be changed from the default
200 with the <option>--keep-files-open-threshold</option>
option.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--keep-files-open-threshold=<replaceable>count</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If specified, overrides the default value of 200 used as the
threshold for qpdf deciding whether or not to keep files open.
See <option>--keep-files-open</option> for details.
</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>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--collate=<replaceable>n</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
When specified, collate rather than concatenate pages from
files specified with <option>--pages</option>. With a numeric
argument, collate in groups of <replaceable>n</replaceable>.
The default is 1. See <xref linkend="ref.page-selection"/> for
additional details.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--flatten-rotation</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
For each page that is rotated using the
<literal>/Rotate</literal> key in the page's dictionary,
remove the <literal>/Rotate</literal> key and implement the
identical rotation semantics by modifying the page's contents.
This option can be useful to prepare files for buggy PDF
applications that don't properly handle rotated pages.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--split-pages=[n]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Write each group of <option>n</option> pages to a separate
output file. If <option>n</option> is not specified, create
single pages. Output file names are generated as follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
If the string <literal>%d</literal> appears in the output
file name, it is replaced with a range of zero-padded page
numbers starting from 1.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Otherwise, if the output file name ends in
<filename>.pdf</filename> (case insensitive), a zero-padded
page range, preceded by a dash, is inserted before the file
extension.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Otherwise, the file name is appended with a zero-padded
page range preceded by a dash.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Page ranges are a single number in the case of single-page
groups or two numbers separated by a dash otherwise.
For example, if <filename>infile.pdf</filename> has 12 pages
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<command>qpdf --split-pages infile.pdf %d-out</command>
would generate files <filename>01-out</filename> through
<filename>12-out</filename>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<command>qpdf --split-pages=2 infile.pdf
outfile.pdf</command> would generate files
<filename>outfile-01-02.pdf</filename> through
<filename>outfile-11-12.pdf</filename>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<command>qpdf --split-pages infile.pdf
something.else</command> would generate files
<filename>something.else-01</filename> through
<filename>something.else-12</filename>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Note that outlines, threads, and other global features of the
original PDF file are not preserved. For each page of output,
this option creates an empty PDF and copies a single page from
the output into it. If you require the global data, you will
have to run <command>qpdf</command> with the
<option>--pages</option> option once for each file. Using
<option>--split-pages</option> is much faster if you don't
require the global data.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--overlay options --</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Overlay pages from another file onto the output pages. See
<xref linkend="ref.overlay-underlay"/> for details on
overlay/underlay.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--underlay options --</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Overlay pages from another file onto the output pages. See
<xref linkend="ref.overlay-underlay"/> for details on
overlay/underlay.
</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>
Prior to 8.4.0, in the case of passwords that contain characters
that fall outside of 7-bit US-ASCII, qpdf left the burden of
supplying properly encoded encryption and decryption passwords to
the user. Starting in qpdf 8.4.0, qpdf does this automatically in
most cases. For an in-depth discussion, please see <xref
linkend="ref.unicode-passwords"/>. Previous versions of this
manual described workarounds using the <command>iconv</command>
command. Such workarounds are no longer required or recommended
with qpdf 8.4.0. However, for backward compatibility, qpdf
attempts to detect those workarounds and do the right thing in
most cases.
</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 &ldquo;<option>--</option>&rdquo; 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. Starting in qpdf 10.2, qpdf defaults to not
allowing creation of PDF files with a non-empty user password, an
empty owner password, and a 256-bit key since such files can be
opened with no password. If you want to create such files, specify
the encryption option <option>--allow-insecure</option>, as
described below.
</para>
<para>
The value for
<option><replaceable>key-length</replaceable></option> may be 40,
128, or 256. 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. The qpdf library disregards this field when AES is
used or when 256-bit encryption is used. You should really
never disable accessibility, but qpdf lets you do it in case
you need to configure a file this way for testing purposes.
The PDF spec says that conforming readers should disregard
this permission and always allow accessibility.
</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>--assemble=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether document assembly (rotation and reordering
of pages) is allowed.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--annotate=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether modifying annotations is allowed. This
includes adding comments and filling in form fields. Also
allows editing of form fields if
<option>--modify-other=y</option> is given.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--form=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Determines whether filling form fields is allowed.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--modify-other=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Allow all document editing except those controlled separately
by the <option>--assemble</option>,
<option>--annotate</option>, and <option>--form</option>
options.
</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. This way of controlling modify access
has less granularity than new options added in qpdf 8.4.
<option><replaceable>modify-opt</replaceable></option> may be
one of the following:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>all</option>: allow full document modification
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>annotate</option>: allow comment authoring, form
operations, and document assembly
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>form</option>: allow form field fill-in and signing
and document assembly
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>assembly</option>: allow document assembly only
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>none</option>: allow no modifications
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
Using the <option>--modify</option> option does not allow you
to create certain combinations of permissions such as allowing
form filling but not allowing document assembly. Starting with
qpdf 8.4, you can either just use the other options to control
fields individually, or you can use something like
<option>--modify=form --assembly=n</option> to fine tune.
</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>--allow-insecure</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
From qpdf 10.2, qpdf defaults to not allowing creation of PDF
files where the user password is non-empty, the owner password
is empty, and a 256-bit key is in use. Files created in this
way are insecure since they can be opened without a password.
Users would ordinarily never want to create such files. If you
are using qpdf to intentionally created strange files for
testing (a definite valid use of qpdf!), this option allows
you to create such insecure files.
</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>
If <option><replaceable>key-length</replaceable></option> is 256,
the minimum PDF version is 1.7 with extension level 8, and the
AES-based encryption format used is the PDF 2.0 encryption method
supported by Acrobat X. the same options are available as with
128 bits with the following exceptions:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--use-aes</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option is not available with 256-bit keys. AES is always
used with 256-bit encryption keys.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--force-V4</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option is not available with 256 keys.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--force-R5</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If specified, qpdf sets the minimum version to 1.7 at
extension level 3 and writes the deprecated encryption format
used by Acrobat version IX. This option should not be used in
practice to generate PDF files that will be in general use,
but it can be useful to generate files if you are trying to
test proper support in another application for PDF files
encrypted in this way.
</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
&ldquo;<option>--</option>&rdquo; terminates parsing of page
selection flags.
</para>
<para>
Starting with qpf 8.4, the special input file name
&ldquo;<filename>.</filename>&rdquo; can be used shortcut for the
primary input filename.
</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>
Starting with qpdf 5.0.0, it is possible to omit the page range.
If qpdf sees a value in the place where it expects a page range
and that value is not a valid range but is a valid file name, qpdf
will implicitly use the range <literal>1-z</literal>, meaning that
it will include all pages in the file. This makes it possible to
easily combine all pages in a set of files with a command like
<command>qpdf --empty out.pdf --pages *.pdf --</command>.
</para>
<para>
The page range is a set of numbers separated by commas, ranges of
numbers separated dashes, or combinations of those. The character
&ldquo;z&rdquo; represents the last page. A number preceded by an
&ldquo;r&rdquo; indicates to count from the end, so
<literal>r3-r1</literal> would be the last three pages of the
document. 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. Numbers may be repeated in a page range. A page
range may be optionally appended with <literal>:even</literal> or
<literal>:odd</literal> to indicate only the even or odd pages in
the given range. Note that even and odd refer to the positions
within the specified, range, not whether the original number is
even or odd.
</para>
<para>
Example page ranges:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>1,3,5-9,15-12</literal>: pages 1, 3, 5, 6, 7, 8,
9, 15, 14, 13, and 12 in that order.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>z-1</literal>: all pages in the document in reverse
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>r3-r1</literal>: the last three pages of the document
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>r1-r3</literal>: the last three pages of the document
in reverse order
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>1-20:even</literal>: even pages from 2 to 20
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<literal>5,7-9,12:odd</literal>: pages 5, 8, and, 12, which are
the pages in odd positions from among the original range, which
represents pages 5, 7, 8, 9, and 12.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Starting in qpdf version 8.3, you can specify the
<option>--collate</option> option. Note that this option is
specified outside of <option>--pages&nbsp;...&nbsp;--</option>.
When <option>--collate</option> is specified, it changes the
meaning of <option>--pages</option> so that the specified files,
as modified by page ranges, are collated rather than concatenated.
For example, if you add the files <filename>odd.pdf</filename> and
<filename>even.pdf</filename> containing odd and even pages of a
document respectively, you could run <command>qpdf --collate
odd.pdf --pages odd.pdf even.pdf -- all.pdf</command> to collate
the pages. This would pick page 1 from odd, page 1 from even, page
2 from odd, page 2 from even, etc. until all pages have been
included. Any number of files and page ranges can be specified. If
any file has fewer pages, that file is just skipped when its pages
have all been included. For example, if you ran <command>qpdf
--collate --empty --pages a.pdf 1-5 b.pdf 6-4 c.pdf r1 --
out.pdf</command>, you would get the following pages in this
order:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 1</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>b.pdf page 6</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>c.pdf last page</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 2</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>b.pdf page 5</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 3</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>b.pdf page 4</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 4</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 5</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Starting in qpdf version 10.2, you may specify a numeric argument
to <option>--collate</option>. With
<option>--collate=<replaceable>n</replaceable></option>, pull
groups of <replaceable>n</replaceable> pages from each file,
again, stopping when there are no more pages. For example, if you
ran <command>qpdf --collate=2 --empty --pages a.pdf 1-5 b.pdf 6-4
c.pdf r1 -- out.pdf</command>, you would get the following pages
in this order:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 1</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 2</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>b.pdf page 6</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>b.pdf page 5</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>c.pdf last page</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 3</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 4</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>b.pdf page 4</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>a.pdf page 5</para></listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Starting in qpdf version 8.3, when you split and merge files, any
page labels (page numbers) are preserved in the final file. It is
expected that more document features will be preserved by
splitting and merging. In the mean time, 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. 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 . 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&ndash;5 from
<filename>file1.pdf</filename> and pages 11&ndash;15 from
<filename>file2.pdf</filename> in reverse, taking document-level
metadata from <filename>file2.pdf</filename>, you would run
<programlisting><command>qpdf</command> <option>file2.pdf --pages file1.pdf 1-5 . 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 document-level metadata 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>
<para>
Prior to version 8.4, it was not possible to specify the same page
from the same file directly more than once, and the workaround of
specifying the same file in more than one way was required.
Version 8.4 removes this limitation, but there is still a valid
use case. When you specify the same page from the same file more
than once, qpdf will share objects between the pages. If you are
going to do further manipulation on the file and need the two
instances of the same original page to be deep copies, then you
can specify the file in two different ways. For example
<command>qpdf in.pdf --pages . 1 ./in.pdf 1 -- out.pdf</command>
would create a file with two copies of the first page of the
input, and the two copies would share any objects in common. This
includes fonts, images, and anything else the page references.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.overlay-underlay">
<title>Overlay and Underlay Options</title>
<para>
Starting with qpdf 8.4, it is possible to overlay or underlay
pages from other files onto the output generated by qpdf. Specify
overlay or underlay as follows:
<programlisting>{ <option>--overlay</option> | <option>--underlay</option> } <replaceable>file</replaceable> [ <option>options</option> ] <option>--</option>
</programlisting>
Overlay and underlay options are processed late, so they can be
combined with other like merging and will apply to the final
output. The <option>--overlay</option> and
<option>--underlay</option> options work the same way, except
underlay pages are drawn underneath the page to which they are
applied, possibly obscured by the original page, and overlay files
are drawn on top of the page to which they are applied, possibly
obscuring the page. You can combine overlay and underlay.
</para>
<para>
The default behavior of overlay and underlay is that pages are
taken from the overlay/underlay file in sequence and applied to
corresponding pages in the output until there are no more output
pages. If the overlay or underlay file runs out of pages,
remaining output pages are left alone. This behavior can be
modified by options, which are provided between the
<option>--overlay</option> or <option>--underlay</option> flag and
the <option>--</option> option. The following options are
supported:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--password=password</option>: supply a password if the
overlay/underlay file is encrypted.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--to=page-range</option>: a range of pages in the same
form at described in <xref linkend="ref.page-selection"/>
indicates which pages in the output should have the
overlay/underlay applied. If not specified, overlay/underlay
are applied to all pages.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--from=[page-range]</option>: a range of pages that
specifies which pages in the overlay/underlay file will be used
for overlay or underlay. If not specified, all pages will be
used. This can be explicitly specified to be empty if
<option>--repeat</option> is used.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--repeat=page-range</option>: an optional range of
pages that specifies which pages in the overlay/underlay file
will be repeated after the &ldquo;from&rdquo; pages are used
up. If you want to repeat a range of pages starting at the
beginning, you can explicitly use <option>--from=</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Here are some examples.
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<command>--overlay o.pdf --to=1-5 --from=1-3
--repeat=4 --</command>: overlay the first three pages from file
<filename>o.pdf</filename> onto the first three pages of the
output, then overlay page 4 from <filename>o.pdf</filename>
onto pages 4 and 5 of the output. Leave remaining output pages
untouched.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<command>--underlay footer.pdf --from= --repeat=1,2 --</command>:
Underlay page 1 of <filename>footer.pdf</filename> on all odd
output pages, and underlay page 2 of
<filename>footer.pdf</filename> on all even output pages.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.attachments">
<title>Embedded Files/Attachments Options</title>
<para>
Starting with qpdf 10.2, you can work with file attachments in PDF
files from the command line. The following options are available:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--list-attachments</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Show the &ldquo;key&rdquo; and stream number for embedded
files. With <option>--verbose</option>, additional
information, including preferred file name, description,
dates, and more are also displayed. The key is usually but not
always equal to the file name, and is needed by some of the
other options.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--show-attachment=<replaceable>key</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Write the contents of the specified attachment to standard
output as binary data. The key should match one of the keys
shown by <option>--list-attachments</option>. If specified
multiple times, only the last attachment will be shown.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--add-attachment <replaceable>file</replaceable> <replaceable>options</replaceable> --</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Add or replace an attachment with the contents of
<replaceable>file</replaceable>. This may be specified more
than once. The following additional options may appear before
the <literal>--</literal> that ends this option:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--key=<replaceable>key</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
The key to use to register the attachment in the embedded
files table. Defaults to the last path element of
<replaceable>file</replaceable>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--filename=<replaceable>name</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
The file name to be used for the attachment. This is what is usually
displayed to the user and is the name most graphical PDF
viewers will use when saving a file. It defaults to the
last path element of <replaceable>file</replaceable>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--creationdate=<replaceable>date</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
The attachment's creation date in PDF format; defaults to
the current time. The date format is explained below.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--moddate=<replaceable>date</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
The attachment's modification date in PDF format; defaults
to the current time. The date format is explained below.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--mimetype=<replaceable>type/subtype</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
The mime type for the attachment, e.g.
<literal>text/plain</literal> or
<literal>application/pdf</literal>. Note that the mimetype
appears in a field called <literal>/Subtype</literal> in
the PDF but actually includes the full type and subtype of
the mime type.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--description=<replaceable>&quot;text&quot;</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Descriptive text for the attachment, displayed by some PDF
viewers.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--replace</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Indicates that any existing attachment with the same key
should be replaced by the new attachment. Otherwise,
<command>qpdf</command> gives an error if an attachment
with that key is already present.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--remove-attachment=<replaceable>key</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Remove the specified attachment. This doesn't only remove the
attachment from the embedded files table but also clears out
the file specification. That means that any potential internal
links to the attachment will be broken. This option may be
specified multiple times. Run with <option>--verbose</option>
to see status of the removal.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--copy-attachments-from <replaceable>file</replaceable> <replaceable>options</replaceable> --</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Copy attachments from another file. This may be specified more
than once. The following additional options may appear before
the <literal>--</literal> that ends this option:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--password=<replaceable>password</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If required, the password needed to open
<replaceable>file</replaceable>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--prefix=<replaceable>prefix</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Only required if the file from which attachments are being
copied has attachments with keys that conflict with
attachments already in the file. In this case, the
specified prefix will be prepended to each key. This
affects only the key in the embedded files table, not the
file name. The PDF specification doesn't preclude multiple
attachments having the same file name.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
When a date is required, the date should conform to the PDF date
format specification, which is
<literal>D:</literal><replaceable>yyyymmddhhmmss&lt;z&gt;</replaceable>,
where <replaceable>&lt;z&gt;</replaceable> is either
<literal>Z</literal> for UTC or a timezone offset in the form
<replaceable>-hh'mm'</replaceable> or
<replaceable>+hh'mm'</replaceable>. Examples:
<literal>D:20210207161528-05'00'</literal>,
<literal>D:20210207211528Z</literal>.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.advanced-parsing">
<title>Advanced Parsing Options</title>
<para>
These options control aspects of how qpdf reads PDF files. Mostly
these are of use to people who are working with damaged files.
There is little reason to use these options unless you are trying
to solve specific problems. The following options are available:
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--suppress-recovery</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Prevents qpdf from attempting to recover damaged files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--ignore-xref-streams</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Tells qpdf to ignore any cross-reference streams.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</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>
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>
</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>--compress-streams=<replaceable>[yn]</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
By default, or with <option>--compress-streams=y</option>,
qpdf will compress any stream with no other filters applied to
it with the <literal>/FlateDecode</literal> filter when it
writes it. To suppress this behavior and preserve uncompressed
streams as uncompressed, use
<option>--compress-streams=n</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--decode-level=<replaceable>option</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Controls which streams qpdf tries to decode. The default is
<option>generalized</option>. The following options are
available:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>none</option>: do not attempt to decode any streams
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>generalized</option>: decode streams filtered with
supported generalized filters:
<literal>/LZWDecode</literal>,
<literal>/FlateDecode</literal>,
<literal>/ASCII85Decode</literal>, and
<literal>/ASCIIHexDecode</literal>. We define generalized
filters as those to be used for general-purpose compression
or encoding, as opposed to filters specifically designed
for image data. Note that, by default, streams already
compressed with <literal>/FlateDecode</literal> are not
uncompressed and recompressed unless you also specify
<option>--recompress-flate</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>specialized</option>: in addition to generalized,
decode streams with supported non-lossy specialized
filters; currently this is just
<literal>/RunLengthDecode</literal>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>all</option>: in addition to generalized and
specialized, decode streams with supported lossy filters;
currently this is just <literal>/DCTDecode</literal> (JPEG)
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--stream-data=<replaceable>option</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Controls transformation of stream data. This option predates
the <option>--compress-streams</option> and
<option>--decode-level</option> options. Those options can be
used to achieve the same affect with more control. 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); equivalent to
<option>--compress-streams=y</option>
<option>--decode-level=generalized</option>. Does not
recompress streams already compressed with
<literal>/FlateDecode</literal> unless
<option>--recompress-flate</option> is also specified.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>preserve</option>: leave all stream data as is;
equivalent to <option>--compress-streams=n</option>
<option>--decode-level=none</option>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>uncompress</option>: uncompress stream data
compressed with generalized filters when possible;
equivalent to <option>--compress-streams=n</option>
<option>--decode-level=generalized</option>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--recompress-flate</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
By default, streams already compressed with
<literal>/FlateDecode</literal> are left alone rather than
being uncompressed and recompressed. This option causes qpdf
to uncompress and recompress the streams. There is a
significant performance cost to using this option, but you
probably want to use it if you specify
<option>--compression-level</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--compression-level=<replaceable>level</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
When writing new streams that are compressed with
<literal>/FlateDecode</literal>, use the specified compression
level. The value of <option>level</option> should be a number
from 1 to 9 and is passed directly to zlib, which implements
deflate compression. Note that qpdf doesn't uncompress and
recompress streams by default. To have this option apply to
already compressed streams, you should also specify
<option>--recompress-flate</option>. If your goal is to shrink
the size of PDF files, you should also use
<option>--object-streams=generate</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--normalize-content=[yn]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Enables or disables normalization of content streams. Content
normalization is enabled by default in QDF mode. Please see
<xref linkend="ref.qdf"/> for additional discussion of QDF
mode.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--object-streams=<replaceable>mode</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Controls handling 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>--preserve-unreferenced</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Tells qpdf to preserve objects that are not referenced when
writing the file. Ordinarily any object that is not referenced
in a traversal of the document from the trailer dictionary
will be discarded. This may be useful in working with some
damaged files or inspecting files with known unreferenced
objects.
</para>
<para>
This flag is ignored for linearized files and has the effect
of causing objects in the new file to be written in order by
object ID from the original file. This does not mean that
object numbers will be the same since qpdf may create stream
lengths as direct or indirect differently from the original
file, and the original file may have gaps in its numbering.
</para>
<para>
See also <option>--preserve-unreferenced-resources</option>,
which does something completely different.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--remove-unreferenced-resources=<replaceable>option</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
The <replaceable>option</replaceable> may be
<literal>auto</literal>, <literal>yes</literal>, or
<literal>no</literal>. The default is <literal>auto</literal>.
</para>
<para>
Starting with qpdf 8.1, when splitting pages, qpdf is able to
attempt to remove images and fonts that are not used by a page
even if they are referenced in the page's resources
dictionary. When shared resources are in use, this behavior
can greatly reduce the file sizes of split pages, but the
analysis is very slow. In versions from 8.1 through 9.1.1,
qpdf did this analysis by default. Starting in qpdf 10.0.0, if
<literal>auto</literal> is used, qpdf does a quick analysis of
the file to determine whether the file is likely to have
unreferenced objects on pages, a pattern that frequently
occurs when resource dictionaries are shared across multiple
pages and rarely occurs otherwise. If it discovers this
pattern, then it will attempt to remove unreferenced
resources. Usually this means you get the slower splitting
speed only when it's actually going to create smaller files.
You can suppress removal of unreferenced resources altogether
by specifying <literal>no</literal> or force it to do the full
algorithm by specifying <literal>yes</literal>.
</para>
<para>
Other than cases in which you don't care about file size and
care a lot about runtime, there are few reasons to use this
option, especially now that <literal>auto</literal> mode is
supported. One reason to use this is if you suspect that qpdf
is removing resources it shouldn't be removing. If you
encounter that case, please report it as bug at <ulink
url="https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/">https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--preserve-unreferenced-resources</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This is a synonym for
<option>--remove-unreferenced-resources=no</option>.
</para>
<para>
See also <option>--preserve-unreferenced</option>, which does
something completely different.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--newline-before-endstream</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Tells qpdf to insert a newline before the
<literal>endstream</literal> keyword, not counted in the
length, after any stream content even if the last character of
the stream was a newline. This may result in two newlines in
some cases. This is a requirement of PDF/A. While qpdf doesn't
specifically know how to generate PDF/A-compliant PDFs, this
at least prevents it from removing compliance on already
compliant files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--linearize-pass1=<replaceable>file</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Write the first pass of linearization to the named file. The
resulting file is not a valid PDF file. This option is useful
only for debugging <classname>QPDFWriter</classname>'s
linearization code. When qpdf linearizes files, it writes the
file in two passes, using the first pass to calculate sizes
and offsets that are required for hint tables and the
linearization dictionary. Ordinarily, the first pass is
discarded. This option enables it to be captured.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--coalesce-contents</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
When a page's contents are split across multiple streams, this
option causes qpdf to combine them into a single stream. Use
of this option is never necessary for ordinary usage, but it
can help when working with some files in some cases. For
example, this can also be combined with QDF mode or content
normalization to make it easier to look at all of a page's
contents at once.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--flatten-annotations=<replaceable>option</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option collapses annotations into the pages' contents
with special handling for form fields. Ordinarily, an
annotation is rendered separately and on top of the page.
Combining annotations into the page's contents effectively
freezes the placement of the annotations, making them look
right after various page transformations. The library
functionality backing this option was added for the benefit of
programs that want to create <emphasis>n-up</emphasis> page
layouts and other similar things that don't work well with
annotations. The <replaceable>option</replaceable> parameter
may be any of the following:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>all</option>: include all annotations that are not
marked invisible or hidden
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>print</option>: only include annotations that
indicate that they should appear when the page is printed
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>screen</option>: omit annotations that indicate
they should not appear on the screen
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Note that form fields are special because the annotations that
are used to render filled-in form fields may become out of
date from the fields' values if the form is filled in by a
program that doesn't know how to update the appearances. If
qpdf detects this case, its default behavior is not to flatten
those annotations because doing so would cause the value of
the form field to be lost. This gives you a chance to go back
and resave the form with a program that knows how to generate
appearances. QPDF itself can generate appearances with some
limitations. See the <option>--generate-appearances</option>
option below.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--generate-appearances</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
If a file contains interactive form fields and indicates that
the appearances are out of date with the values of the form,
this flag will regenerate appearances, subject to a few
limitations. Note that there is not usually a reason to do
this, but it can be necessary before using the
<option>--flatten-annotations</option> option. Most of these
are not a problem with well-behaved PDF files. The limitations
are as follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Radio button and checkbox appearances use the pre-set
values in the PDF file. QPDF just makes sure that the
correct appearance is displayed based on the value of the
field. This is fine for PDF files that create their forms
properly. Some PDF writers save appearances for fields when
they change, which could cause some controls to have
inconsistent appearances.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
For text fields and list boxes, any characters that fall
outside of US-ASCII or, if detected, &ldquo;Windows
ANSI&rdquo; or &ldquo;Mac Roman&rdquo; encoding, will be
replaced by the <literal>?</literal> character.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Quadding is ignored. Quadding is used to specify whether
the contents of a field should be left, center, or right
aligned with the field.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Rich text, multi-line, and other more elaborate formatting
directives are ignored.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
There is no support for multi-select fields or signature
fields.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
If qpdf doesn't do a good enough job with your form, use an
external application to save your filled-in form before
processing it with qpdf.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--optimize-images</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This flag causes qpdf to recompress all images that are not
compressed with DCT (JPEG) using DCT compression as long as
doing so decreases the size in bytes of the image data and the
image does not fall below minimum specified dimensions. Useful
information is provided when used in combination with
<option>--verbose</option>. See also the
<option>--oi-min-width</option>,
<option>--oi-min-height</option>, and
<option>--oi-min-area</option> options. By default, starting
in qpdf 8.4, inline images are converted to regular images
and optimized as well. Use
<option>--keep-inline-images</option> to prevent inline images
from being included.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--oi-min-width=<replaceable>width</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Avoid optimizing images whose width is below the specified
amount. If omitted, the default is 128 pixels. Use 0 for no
minimum.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--oi-min-height=<replaceable>height</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Avoid optimizing images whose height is below the specified
amount. If omitted, the default is 128 pixels. Use 0 for no
minimum.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--oi-min-area=<replaceable>area-in-pixels</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Avoid optimizing images whose pixel count
(width&nbsp;×&nbsp;height) is below the specified amount. If
omitted, the default is 16,384 pixels. Use 0 for no minimum.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--externalize-inline-images</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Convert inline images to regular images. By default, images
whose data is at least 1,024 bytes are converted when this
option is selected. Use <option>--ii-min-bytes</option> to
change the size threshold. This option is implicitly selected
when <option>--optimize-images</option> is selected. Use
<option>--keep-inline-images</option> to exclude inline images
from image optimization.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--ii-min-bytes=<replaceable>bytes</replaceable></option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Avoid converting inline images whose size is below the
specified minimum size to regular images. If omitted, the
default is 1,024 bytes. Use 0 for no minimum.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--keep-inline-images</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Prevent inline images from being included in image
optimization. This option has no affect when
<option>--optimize-images</option> is not specified.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--remove-page-labels</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Remove page labels from the output file.
</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"/>. Note that
<option>--linearize</option> disables QDF mode.
</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>
<para>
The version number may be expressed in the form
<replaceable>major.minor.extension-level</replaceable>, in
which case the version is interpreted as
<replaceable>major.minor</replaceable> at extension level
<replaceable>extension-level</replaceable>. For example,
version <literal>1.7.8</literal> represents version 1.7 at
extension level 8. Note that minimal syntax checking is done
on the command line.
</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>. The version
number is interpreted in the same way as with
<option>--min-version</option> so that extension levels can be
set. 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,
256-bit keys are disabled if the version is less than 1.7 with
extension level 8 (except R5 is disabled if less than 1.7 with
extension level 3), 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>--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 &ldquo;production&rdquo; PDF files.
</para>
<para>
When normalizing content, if qpdf runs into any lexical errors, it
will print a warning indicating that content may be damaged. The
only situation in which qpdf is known to cause damage during
content normalization is when a page's contents are split across
multiple streams and streams are split in the middle of a lexical
token such as a string, name, or inline image. Note that files
that do this are invalid since the PDF specification states that
content streams are not to be split in the middle of a token. If
you want to inspect the original content streams in an
uncompressed format, you can always run with <option>--qdf
--normalize-content=n</option> for a QDF file without content
normalization, or alternatively
<option>--stream-data=uncompress</option> for a regular non-QDF
mode file with uncompressed streams. These will both uncompress
all the streams but will not attempt to normalize content. Please
note that if you are using content normalization or QDF mode for
the purpose of manually inspecting files, you don't have to care
about this.
</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>
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>--deterministic-id</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Causes generation of a deterministic value for /ID. This
prevents use of timestamp and output file name information in
the /ID generation. Instead, at some slight additional runtime
cost, the /ID field is generated to include a digest of the
significant parts of the content of the output PDF file. This
means that a given qpdf operation should generate the same /ID
each time it is run, which can be useful when caching results
or for generation of some test data. Use of this flag is not
compatible with creation of encrypted files.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<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. If you
are trying to get the same /ID each time for a given file and
you are not generating encrypted files, consider using the
<option>--deterministic-id</option> option.
</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>--show-encryption-key</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
When encryption information is being displayed, as when
<option>--check</option> or <option>--show-encryption</option>
is given, display the computed or retrieved encryption key as
a hexadecimal string. This value is not ordinarily useful to
users, but it can be used as the argument to
<option>--password</option> if the
<option>--password-is-hex-key</option> is specified. Note
that, when PDF files are encrypted, passwords and other
metadata are used only to compute an encryption key, and the
encryption key is what is actually used for encryption. This
enables retrieval of that key.
</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=trailer|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 &ldquo;compressed objects&rdquo;).
</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-npages</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Prints the number of pages in the input file on a line by
itself. Since the number of pages appears by itself on a
line, this option can be useful for scripting if you need to
know the number of pages in a file.
</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>--json</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Generate a JSON representation of the file. This is described
in depth in <xref linkend="ref.json"/>
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--json-help</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
Describe the format of the JSON output.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--json-key=key</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option is repeatable. If specified, only top-level keys
specified will be included in the JSON output. If not
specified, all keys will be shown.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term><option>--json-object=trailer|obj[,gen]</option></term>
<listitem>
<para>
This option is repeatable. If specified, only specified
objects will be shown in the
&ldquo;<literal>objects</literal>&rdquo; key of the JSON
output. If absent, all objects will be shown.
</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&nbsp;2.0.4). When <option>--check</option> is combined
with other options, checks are always performed before any
other options are processed. For erroneous files,
<option>--check</option> will cause qpdf to attempt to
recover, after which other options are effectively operating
on the recovered file. Combining <option>--check</option> with
other options in this way can be useful for manually
recovering severely damaged files. Note that
<option>--check</option> produces no output to standard output
when everything is valid, so if you are using this to
programmatically validate files in bulk, it is safe to run
without output redirected to <filename>/dev/null</filename>
and just check for a 0 exit code.
</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>
<sect1 id="ref.unicode-passwords">
<title>Unicode Passwords</title>
<para>
At the library API level, all methods that perform encryption and
decryption interpret passwords as strings of bytes. It is up to
the caller to ensure that they are appropriately encoded. Starting
with qpdf version 8.4.0, qpdf will attempt to make this easier for
you when interact with qpdf via its command line interface. The
PDF specification requires passwords used to encrypt files with
40-bit or 128-bit encryption to be encoded with PDF Doc encoding.
This encoding is a single-byte encoding that supports ISO-Latin-1
and a handful of other commonly used characters. It has a large
overlap with Windows ANSI but is not exactly the same. There is
generally not a way to provide PDF Doc encoded strings on the
command line. As such, qpdf versions prior to 8.4.0 would often
create PDF files that couldn't be opened with other software when
given a password with non-ASCII characters to encrypt a file with
40-bit or 128-bit encryption. Starting with qpdf 8.4.0, qpdf
recognizes the encoding of the parameter and transcodes it as
needed. The rest of this section provides the details about
exactly how qpdf behaves. Most users will not need to know this
information, but it might be useful if you have been working
around qpdf's old behavior or if you are using qpdf to generate
encrypted files for testing other PDF software.
</para>
<para>
A note about Windows: when qpdf builds, it attempts to determine
what it has to do to use <function>wmain</function> instead of
<function>main</function> on Windows. The
<function>wmain</function> function is an alternative entry point
that receives all arguments as UTF-16-encoded strings. When qpdf
starts up this way, it converts all the strings to UTF-8 encoding
and then invokes the regular main. This means that, as far as qpdf
is concerned, it receives its command-line arguments with UTF-8
encoding, just as it would in any modern Linux or UNIX
environment.
</para>
<para>
If a file is being encrypted with 40-bit or 128-bit encryption and
the supplied password is not a valid UTF-8 string, qpdf will fall
back to the behavior of interpreting the password as a string of
bytes. If you have old scripts that encrypt files by passing the
output of <command>iconv</command> to qpdf, you no longer need to
do that, but if you do, qpdf should still work. The only exception
would be for the extremely unlikely case of a password that is
encoded with a single-byte encoding but also happens to be valid
UTF-8. Such a password would contain strings of even numbers of
characters that alternate between accented letters and symbols. In
the extremely unlikely event that you are intentionally using such
passwords and qpdf is thwarting you by interpreting them as UTF-8,
you can use <option>--password-mode=bytes</option> to suppress
qpdf's automatic behavior.
</para>
<para>
The <option>--password-mode</option> option, as described earlier
in this chapter, can be used to change qpdf's interpretation of
supplied passwords. There are very few reasons to use this option.
One would be the unlikely case described in the previous paragraph
in which the supplied password happens to be valid UTF-8 but isn't
supposed to be UTF-8. Your best bet would be just to provide the
password as a valid UTF-8 string, but you could also use
<option>--password-mode=bytes</option>. Another reason to use
<option>--password-mode=bytes</option> would be to intentionally
generate PDF files encrypted with passwords that are not properly
encoded. The qpdf test suite does this to generate invalid files
for the purpose of testing its password recovery capability. If
you were trying to create intentionally incorrect files for a
similar purposes, the <option>bytes</option> password mode can
enable you to do this.
</para>
<para>
When qpdf attempts to decrypt a file with a password that contains
non-ASCII characters, it will generate a list of alternative
passwords by attempting to interpret the password as each of a
handful of different coding systems and then transcode them to the
required format. This helps to compensate for the supplied
password being given in the wrong coding system, such as would
happen if you used the <command>iconv</command> workaround that
was previously needed. It also generates passwords by doing the
reverse operation: translating from correct in incorrect encoding
of the password. This would enable qpdf to decrypt files using
passwords that were improperly encoded by whatever software
encrypted the files, including older versions of qpdf invoked
without properly encoded passwords. The combination of these two
recovery methods should make qpdf transparently open most
encrypted files with the password supplied correctly but in the
wrong coding system. There are no real downsides to this behavior,
but if you don't want qpdf to do this, you can use the
<option>--suppress-password-recovery</option> option. One reason
to do that is to ensure that you know the exact password that was
used to encrypt the file.
</para>
<para>
With these changes, qpdf now generates compliant passwords in most
cases. There are still some exceptions. In particular, the PDF
specification directs compliant writers to normalize Unicode
passwords and to perform certain transformations on passwords with
bidirectional text. Implementing this functionality requires using
a real Unicode library like ICU. If a client application that uses
qpdf wants to do this, the qpdf library will accept the resulting
passwords, but qpdf will not perform these transformations itself.
It is possible that this will be addressed in a future version of
qpdf. The <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> methods that enable
encryption on the output file accept passwords as strings of
bytes.
</para>
<para>
Please note that the <option>--password-is-hex-key</option> option
is unrelated to all this. This flag bypasses the normal process of
going from password to encryption string entirely, allowing the
raw encryption key to be specified directly. This is useful for
forensic purposes or for brute-force recovery of files with
unknown passwords.
</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). Note that QDF mode does not support
linearized files. If you enable linearization, QDF mode is
automatically disabled.
</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>
<sect1 id="ref.using.from-cxx">
<title>Using QPDF from C++</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/QPDFWriter.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
&lt;qpdf/QPDF.hh&gt;</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>-lz -ljpeg</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>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.using.other-languages">
<title>Using QPDF from other languages</title>
<para>
The qpdf library is implemented in C++, which makes it hard to use
directly in other languages. There are a few things that can help.
</para>
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>&ldquo;C&rdquo;</term>
<listitem>
<para>
The qpdf library includes a &ldquo;C&rdquo; language interface
that provides a subset of the overall capabilities. The header
file <filename>qpdf/qpdf-c.h</filename> includes information
about its use. As long as you use a C++ linker, you can link C
programs with qpdf and use the C API. For languages that can
directly load methods from a shared library, the C API can also
be useful. People have reported success using the C API from
other languages on Windows by directly calling functions in the
DLL.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Python</term>
<listitem>
<para>
A Python module called <ulink
url="https://pypi.org/project/pikepdf/">pikepdf</ulink>
provides a clean and highly functional set of Python bindings
to the qpdf library. Using pikepdf, you can work with PDF files
in a natural way and combine qpdf's capabilities with other
functionality provided by Python's rich standard library and
available modules.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Other Languages</term>
<listitem>
<para>
Starting with version 8.3.0, the <command>qpdf</command>
command-line tool can produce a JSON representation of the PDF
file's non-content data. This can facilitate interacting
programmatically with PDF files through qpdf's command line
interface. For more information, please see <xref
linkend="ref.json"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.unicode-files">
<title>A Note About Unicode File Names</title>
<para>
When strings are passed to qpdf library routines either as
<literal>char*</literal> or as <literal>std::string</literal>,
they are treated as byte arrays except where otherwise noted. When
Unicode is desired, qpdf wants UTF-8 unless otherwise noted in
comments in header files. In modern UNIX/Linux environments, this
generally does the right thing. In Windows, it's a bit more
complicated. Starting in qpdf 8.4.0, passwords that contain
Unicode characters are handled much better, and starting in qpdf
8.4.1, the library attempts to properly handle Unicode characters
in filenames. In particular, in Windows, if a UTF-8 encoded string
is used as a filename in either <classname>QPDF</classname> or
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname>, it is internally converted to
<literal>wchar_t*</literal>, and Unicode-aware Windows APIs are
used. As such, qpdf will generally operate properly on files with
non-ASCII characters in their names as long as the filenames are
UTF-8 encoded for passing into the qpdf library API, but there are
still some rough edges, such as the encoding of the filenames in
error messages our CLI output messages. Patches or bug reports are
welcome for any continuing issues with Unicode file names in
Windows.
</para>
</sect1>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.weak-crypto">
<title>Weak Cryptography</title>
<para>
Start with version 10.4, qpdf is taking steps to reduce the
likelihood of a user <emphasis>accidentally</emphasis> creating PDF
files with insecure cryptography but will continue to allow
creation of such files indefinitely with explicit acknowledgment.
</para>
<para>
The PDF file format makes use of RC4, which is known to be a weak
cryptography algorithm, and MD5, which is a weak hashing algorithm.
In version 10.4, qpdf generates warnings for some (but not all)
cases of writing files with weak cryptography when invoked from the
command-line. These warnings can be suppressed using the
<option>--allow-weak-crypto</option> option.
</para>
<para>
It is planned for qpdf version 11 to be stricter, making it an
error to write files with insecure cryptography from the
command-line tool in most cases without specifying the
<option>--allow-weak-crypto</option> flag and also to require
explicit steps when using the C++ library to enable use of insecure
cryptography.
</para>
<para>
Note that qpdf must always retain support for weak cryptographic
algorithms since this is required for reading older PDF files that
use it. Additionally, qpdf will always retain the ability to create
files using weak cryptographic algorithms since, as a development
tool, qpdf explicitly supports creating older or deprecated types
of PDF files since these are sometimes needed to test or work with
older versions of software. Even if other cryptography libraries
drop support for RC4 or MD5, qpdf can always fall back to its
internal implementations of those algorithms, so they are not going
to disappear from qpdf.
</para>
</chapter>
<chapter id="ref.json">
<title>QPDF JSON</title>
<sect1 id="ref.json-overview">
<title>Overview</title>
<para>
Beginning with qpdf version 8.3.0, the <command>qpdf</command>
command-line program can produce a JSON representation of the
non-content data in a PDF file. It includes a dump in JSON format
of all objects in the PDF file excluding the content of streams.
This JSON representation makes it very easy to look in detail at
the structure of a given PDF file, and it also provides a great way
to work with PDF files programmatically from the command-line in
languages that can't call or link with the qpdf library directly.
Note that stream data can be extracted from PDF files using other
qpdf command-line options.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.json-guarantees">
<title>JSON Guarantees</title>
<para>
The qpdf JSON representation includes a JSON serialization of the
raw objects in the PDF file as well as some computed information in
a more easily extracted format. QPDF provides some guarantees about
its JSON format. These guarantees are designed to simplify the
experience of a developer working with the JSON format.
<variablelist>
<varlistentry>
<term>Compatibility</term>
<listitem>
<para>
The top-level JSON object output is a dictionary. The JSON
output contains various nested dictionaries and arrays. With
the exception of dictionaries that are populated by the fields
of objects from the file, all instances of a dictionary are
guaranteed to have exactly the same keys. Future versions of
qpdf are free to add additional keys but not to remove keys or
change the type of object that a key points to. The qpdf
program validates this guarantee, and in the unlikely event
that a bug in qpdf should cause it to generate data that
doesn't conform to this rule, it will ask you to file a bug
report.
</para>
<para>
The top-level JSON structure contains a
&ldquo;<literal>version</literal>&rdquo; key whose value is
simple integer. The value of the <literal>version</literal> key
will be incremented if a non-compatible change is made. A
non-compatible change would be any change that involves removal
of a key, a change to the format of data pointed to by a key,
or a semantic change that requires a different interpretation
of a previously existing key. A strong effort will be made to
avoid breaking compatibility.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Documentation</term>
<listitem>
<para>
The <command>qpdf</command> command can be invoked with the
<option>--json-help</option> option. This will output a JSON
structure that has the same structure as the JSON output that
qpdf generates, except that each field in the help output is a
description of the corresponding field in the JSON output. The
specific guarantees are as follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
A dictionary in the help output means that the
corresponding location in the actual JSON output is also a
dictionary with exactly the same keys; that is, no keys
present in help are absent in the real output, and no keys
will be present in the real output that are not in help. As
a special case, if the dictionary has a single key whose
name starts with <literal>&lt;</literal> and ends with
<literal>&gt;</literal>, it means that the JSON output is a
dictionary that can have any keys, each of which conforms
to the value of the special key. This is used for cases in
which the keys of the dictionary are things like object
IDs.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A string in the help output is a description of the item
that appears in the corresponding location of the actual
output. The corresponding output can have any format.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
An array in the help output always contains a single
element. It indicates that the corresponding location in the
actual output is also an array, and that each element of the
array has whatever format is implied by the single element
of the help output's array.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
For example, the help output indicates includes a
&ldquo;<literal>pagelabels</literal>&rdquo; key whose value is
an array of one element. That element is a dictionary with keys
&ldquo;<literal>index</literal>&rdquo; and
&ldquo;<literal>label</literal>&rdquo;. In addition to
describing the meaning of those keys, this tells you that the
actual JSON output will contain a <literal>pagelabels</literal>
array, each of whose elements is a dictionary that contains an
<literal>index</literal> key, a <literal>label</literal> key,
and no other keys.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>Directness and Simplicity</term>
<listitem>
<para>
The JSON output contains the value of every object in the file,
but it also contains some processed data. This is analogous to
how qpdf's library interface works. The processed data is
similar to the helper functions in that it allows you to look
at certain aspects of the PDF file without having to understand
all the nuances of the PDF specification, while the raw objects
allow you to mine the PDF for anything that the higher-level
interfaces are lacking.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
</variablelist>
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="json.limitations">
<title>Limitations of JSON Representation</title>
<para>
There are a few limitations to be aware of with the JSON structure:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Strings, names, and indirect object references in the original
PDF file are all converted to strings in the JSON
representation. In the case of a &ldquo;normal&rdquo; PDF file,
you can tell the difference because a name starts with a slash
(<literal>/</literal>), and an indirect object reference looks
like <literal>n n R</literal>, but if there were to be a string
that looked like a name or indirect object reference, there
would be no way to tell this from the JSON output. Note that
there are certain cases where you know for sure what something
is, such as knowing that dictionary keys in objects are always
names and that certain things in the higher-level computed data
are known to contain indirect object references.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The JSON format doesn't support binary data very well. Mostly
the details are not important, but they are presented here for
information. When qpdf outputs a string in the JSON
representation, it converts the string to UTF-8, assuming usual
PDF string semantics. Specifically, if the original string is
UTF-16, it is converted to UTF-8. Otherwise, it is assumed to
have PDF doc encoding, and is converted to UTF-8 with that
assumption. This causes strange things to happen to binary
strings. For example, if you had the binary string
<literal>&lt;038051&gt;</literal>, this would be output to the
JSON as <literal>\u0003•Q</literal> because
<literal>03</literal> is not a printable character and
<literal>80</literal> is the bullet character in PDF doc
encoding and is mapped to the Unicode value
<literal>2022</literal>. Since <literal>51</literal> is
<literal>Q</literal>, it is output as is. If you wanted to
convert back from here to a binary string, would have to
recognize Unicode values whose code points are higher than
<literal>0xFF</literal> and map those back to their
corresponding PDF doc encoding characters. There is no way to
tell the difference between a Unicode string that was originally
encoded as UTF-16 or one that was converted from PDF doc
encoding. In other words, it's best if you don't try to use the
JSON format to extract binary strings from the PDF file, but if
you really had to, it could be done. Note that qpdf's
<option>--show-object</option> option does not have this
limitation and will reveal the string as encoded in the original
file.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="json.considerations">
<title>JSON: Special Considerations</title>
<para>
For the most part, the built-in JSON help tells you everything you
need to know about the JSON format, but there are a few
non-obvious things to be aware of:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
While qpdf guarantees that keys present in the help will be
present in the output, those fields may be null or empty if the
information is not known or absent in the file. Also, if you
specify <option>--json-keys</option>, the keys that are not
listed will be excluded entirely except for those that
<option>--json-help</option> says are always present.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
In a few places, there are keys with names containing
<literal>pageposfrom1</literal>. The values of these keys are
null or an integer. If an integer, they point to a page index
within the file numbering from 1. Note that JSON indexes from
0, and you would also use 0-based indexing using the API.
However, 1-based indexing is easier in this case because the
command-line syntax for specifying page ranges is 1-based. If
you were going to write a program that looked through the JSON
for information about specific pages and then use the
command-line to extract those pages, 1-based indexing is
easier. Besides, it's more convenient to subtract 1 from a
program in a real programming language than it is to add 1 from
shell code.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The image information included in the <literal>page</literal>
section of the JSON output includes the key
&ldquo;<literal>filterable</literal>&rdquo;. Note that the
value of this field may depend on the
<option>--decode-level</option> that you invoke qpdf with. The
JSON output includes a top-level key
&ldquo;<literal>parameters</literal>&rdquo; that indicates the
decode level used for computing whether a stream was
filterable. For example, jpeg images will be shown as not
filterable by default, but they will be shown as filterable if
you run <command>qpdf --json --decode-level=all</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</sect1>
</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 &ldquo;This file is
damaged,&rdquo;, 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, though it is possible to determine whether an
object is direct or not if this information is needed. 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 C++-11's
<classname>std::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>
The primary class for interacting with PDF objects is
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>. Instances of this class
can be passed around by value, copied, stored in containers, etc.
with very low overhead. Instances of
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> created by reading from a
file will 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>
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 files
<filename>QPDF.hh</filename> and
<filename>QPDFObjectHandle.hh</filename>. There are also some
additional helper classes that provide higher level API functions
for certain document constructions. These are discussed in <xref
linkend="ref.helper-classes"/>.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.helper-classes">
<title>Helper Classes</title>
<para>
QPDF version 8.1 introduced the concept of helper classes. Helper
classes are intended to contain higher level APIs that allow
developers to work with certain document constructs at an
abstraction level above that of
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> while staying true to
qpdf's philosophy of not hiding document structure from the
developer. As with qpdf in general, the goal is take away some of
the more tedious bookkeeping aspects of working with PDF files,
not to remove the need for the developer to understand how the PDF
construction in question works. The driving factor behind the
creation of helper classes was to allow the evolution of higher
level interfaces in qpdf without polluting the interfaces of the
main top-level classes <classname>QPDF</classname> and
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>.
</para>
<para>
There are two kinds of helper classes:
<emphasis>document</emphasis> helpers and
<emphasis>object</emphasis> helpers. Document helpers are
constructed with a reference to a <classname>QPDF</classname>
object and provide methods for working with structures that are at
the document level. Object helpers are constructed with an
instance of a <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> and provide
methods for working with specific types of objects.
</para>
<para>
Examples of document helpers include
<classname>QPDFPageDocumentHelper</classname>, which contains
methods for operating on the document's page trees, such as
enumerating all pages of a document and adding and removing pages;
and <classname>QPDFAcroFormDocumentHelper</classname>, which
contains document-level methods related to interactive forms, such
as enumerating form fields and creating mappings between form
fields and annotations.
</para>
<para>
Examples of object helpers include
<classname>QPDFPageObjectHelper</classname> for performing
operations on pages such as page rotation and some operations on
content streams, <classname>QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper</classname>
for performing operations related to interactive form fields, and
<classname>QPDFAnnotationObjectHelper</classname> for working with
annotations.
</para>
<para>
It is always possible to retrieve the underlying
<classname>QPDF</classname> reference from a document helper and
the underlying <classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> reference
from an object helper. Helpers are designed to be helpers, not
wrappers. The intention is that, in general, it is safe to freely
intermix operations that use helpers with operations that use the
underlying objects. Document and object helpers do not attempt to
provide a complete interface for working with the things they are
helping with, nor do they attempt to encapsulate underlying
structures. They just provide a few methods to help with
error-prone, repetitive, or complex tasks. In some cases, a helper
object may cache some information that is expensive to gather. In
such cases, the helper classes are implemented so that their own
methods keep the cache consistent, and the header file will
provide a method to invalidate the cache and a description of what
kinds of operations would make the cache invalid. If in doubt, you
can always discard a helper class and create a new one with the
same underlying objects, which will ensure that you have discarded
any stale information.
</para>
<para>
By Convention, document helpers are called
<classname>QPDFSomethingDocumentHelper</classname> and are derived
from <classname>QPDFDocumentHelper</classname>, and object helpers
are called <classname>QPDFSomethingObjectHelper</classname> and
are derived from <classname>QPDFObjectHelper</classname>. For
details on specific helpers, please see their header files. You
can find them by looking at
<filename>include/qpdf/QPDF*DocumentHelper.hh</filename> and
<filename>include/qpdf/QPDF*ObjectHelper.hh</filename>.
</para>
<para>
In order to avoid creation of circular dependencies, the following
general guidelines are followed with helper classes:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Core class interfaces do not know about helper classes. For
example, no methods of <classname>QPDF</classname> or
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> will include helper
classes in their interfaces.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Interfaces of object helpers will usually not use document
helpers in their interfaces. This is because it is much more
useful for document helpers to have methods that return object
helpers. Most operations in PDF files start at the document
level and go from there to the object level rather than the
other way around. It can sometimes be useful to map back from
object-level structures to document-level structures. If there
is a desire to do this, it will generally be provided by a
method in the document helper class.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Most of the time, object helpers don't know about other object
helpers. However, in some cases, one type of object may be a
container for another type of object, in which case it may make
sense for the outer object to know about the inner object. For
example, there are methods in the
<classname>QPDFPageObjectHelper</classname> that know
<classname>QPDFAnnotationObjectHelper</classname> because
references to annotations are contained in page dictionaries.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Any helper or core library class may use helpers in their
implementations.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
<para>
Prior to qpdf version 8.1, higher level interfaces were added as
&ldquo;convenience functions&rdquo; in either
<classname>QPDF</classname> or
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>. For compatibility, older
convenience functions for operating with pages will remain in
those classes even as alternatives are provided in helper classes.
Going forward, new higher level interfaces will be provided using
helper classes.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.implementation-notes">
<title>Implementation Notes</title>
<para>
This section contains a few notes about QPDF's internal
implementation, particularly around what it does when it first
processes a file. This section is a bit of a simplification of
what it actually does, but it could serve as a starting point to
someone trying to understand the implementation. There is nothing
in this section that you need to know to use the qpdf library.
</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>
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 iterates in a special mode in which
it accumulates objects until it finds a balancing closer. During
this process, the &ldquo;<literal>R</literal>&rdquo; 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&lt;QDFObject&gt;</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>
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 a PDF header. 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 &ldquo;<literal>&lt;&lt;</literal>&rdquo;, 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
&ldquo;<literal>&gt;&gt;</literal>&rdquo;. Each object that is
read is pushed onto a stack. If
&ldquo;<literal>R</literal>&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;<literal>&gt;&gt;</literal>&rdquo; 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.casting">
<title>Casting Policy</title>
<para>
This section describes the casting policy followed by qpdf's
implementation. This is no concern to qpdf's end users and
largely of no concern to people writing code that uses qpdf, but
it could be of interest to people who are porting qpdf to a new
platform or who are making modifications to the code.
</para>
<para>
The C++ code in qpdf is free of old-style casts except where
unavoidable (e.g. where the old-style cast is in a macro provided
by a third-party header file). When there is a need for a cast,
it is handled, in order of preference, by rewriting the code to
avoid the need for a cast, calling
<function>const_cast</function>, calling
<function>static_cast</function>, calling
<function>reinterpret_cast</function>, or calling some combination
of the above. As a last resort, a compiler-specific
<literal>#pragma</literal> may be used to suppress a warning that
we don't want to fix. Examples may include suppressing warnings
about the use of old-style casts in code that is shared between C
and C++ code.
</para>
<para>
The <classname>QIntC</classname> namespace, provided by
<filename>include/qpdf/QIntC.hh</filename>, implements safe
functions for converting between integer types. These functions do
range checking and throw a <type>std::range_error</type>, which is
subclass of <type>std::runtime_error</type>, if conversion from one
integer type to another results in loss of information. There are
many cases in which we have to move between different integer
types because of incompatible integer types used in interoperable
interfaces. Some are unavoidable, such as moving between sizes and
offsets, and others are there because of old code that is too in
entrenched to be fixable without breaking source compatibility and
causing pain for users. QPDF is compiled with extra warnings to
detect conversions with potential data loss, and all such cases
should be fixed by either using a function from
<classname>QIntC</classname> or a
<function>static_cast</function>.
</para>
<para>
When the intention is just to switch the type because of
exchanging data between incompatible interfaces, use
<classname>QIntC</classname>. This is the usual case. However,
there are some cases in which we are explicitly intending to use
the exact same bit pattern with a different type. This is most
common when switching between signed and unsigned characters. A
lot of qpdf's code uses unsigned characters internally, but
<type>std::string</type> and <type>char</type> are signed. Using
<function>QIntC::to_char</function> would be wrong for converting
from unsigned to signed characters because a negative
<type>char</type> value and the corresponding <type>unsigned
char</type> value greater than 127 <emphasis>mean the same
thing</emphasis>. There are also cases in which we use
<function>static_cast</function> when working with bit fields
where we are not representing a numerical value but rather a bunch
of bits packed together in some integer type. Also note that
<type>size_t</type> and <type>long</type> both typically differ
between 32-bit and 64-bit environments, so sometimes an explicit
cast may not be needed to avoid warnings on one platform but may
be needed on another. A conversion with
<classname>QIntC</classname> should always be used when the types
are different even if the underlying size is the same. QPDF's CI
build builds on 32-bit and 64-bit platforms, and the test suite is
very thorough, so it is hard to make any of the potential errors
here without being caught in build or test.
</para>
<para>
Non-const <type>unsigned char*</type> is used in the
<type>Pipeline</type> interface. The pipeline interface has a
<function>write</function> call that uses <type>unsigned
char*</type> without a <type>const</type> qualifier. The main
reason for this is to support pipelines that make calls to
third-party libraries, such as zlib, that don't include
<type>const</type> in their interfaces. Unfortunately, there are
many places in the code where it is desirable to have <type>const
char*</type> with pipelines. None of the pipeline implementations
in qpdf currently modify the data passed to write, and doing so
would be counter to the intent of <type>Pipeline</type>, but there
is nothing in the code to prevent this from being done. There are
places in the code where <function>const_cast</function> is used
to remove the const-ness of pointers going into
<type>Pipeline</type>s. This could theoretically be unsafe, but
there is adequate testing to assert that it is safe and will
remain safe in qpdf's code.
</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>
<para>
When copying encrypted files, unless otherwise directed, qpdf will
preserve any encryption in force in the original file. qpdf can
do this with either the user or the owner password. There is no
difference in capability based on which password is used. When 40
or 128 bit encryption keys are used, the user password can be
recovered with the owner password. With 256 keys, the user and
owner passwords are used independently to encrypt the actual
encryption key, so while either can be used, the owner password
can no longer be used to recover the user password.
</para>
<para>
Starting with version 4.0.0, qpdf can read files that are not
encrypted but that contain encrypted attachments, but it cannot
write such files. qpdf also requires the password to be specified
in order to open the file, not just to extract attachments, since
once the file is open, all decryption is handled transparently.
When copying files like this while preserving encryption, qpdf
will apply the file's encryption to everything in the file, not
just to the attachments. When decrypting the file, qpdf will
decrypt the attachments. In general, when copying PDF files with
multiple encryption formats, qpdf will choose the newest format.
The only exception to this is that clear-text metadata will be
preserved as clear-text if it is that way in the original file.
</para>
<para>
One point of confusion some people have about encrypted PDF files
is that encryption is not the same as password protection.
Password protected files are always encrypted, but it is also
possible to create encrypted files that do not have passwords.
Internally, such files use the empty string as a password, and
most readers try the empty string first to see if it works and
prompt for a password only if the empty string doesn't work.
Normally such files have an empty user password and a non-empty
owner password. In that way, if the file is opened by an ordinary
reader without specification of password, the restrictions
specified in the encryption dictionary can be enforced. Most users
wouldn't even realize such a file was encrypted. Since qpdf always
ignores the restrictions (except for the purpose of reporting what
they are), qpdf doesn't care which password you use. QPDF will
allow you to create PDF files with non-empty user passwords and
empty owner passwords. Some readers will require a password when
you open these files, and others will open the files without a
password and not enforce restrictions. Having a non-empty user
password and an empty owner password doesn't really make sense
because it would mean that opening the file with the user password
would be more restrictive than not supplying a password at all.
QPDF also allows you to create PDF files with the same password as
both the user and owner password. Some readers will not ever allow
such files to be accessed without restrictions because they never
try the password as the owner password if it works as the user
password. Nonetheless, one of the powerful aspects of qpdf is that
it allows you to finely specify the way encrypted files are
created, even if the results are not useful to some readers. One
use case for this would be for testing a PDF reader to ensure that
it handles odd configurations of input files.
</para>
</sect1>
<sect1 id="ref.random-numbers">
<title>Random Number Generation</title>
<para>
QPDF generates random numbers to support generation of encrypted
data. Starting in qpdf 10.0.0, qpdf uses the crypto provider as
its source of random numbers. Older versions used the OS-provided
source of secure random numbers or, if allowed at build time,
insecure random numbers from stdlib. Starting with version 5.1.0,
you can disable use of OS-provided secure random numbers at build
time. This is especially useful on Windows if you want to avoid a
dependency on Microsoft's cryptography API. You can also supply
your own random data provider. For details on how to do this,
please refer to the top-level README.md file in the source
distribution and to comments in <filename>QUtil.hh</filename>.
</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 &ldquo;unresolved&rdquo; 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 &ldquo;from&rdquo;
<classname>QPDF</classname> object must remain valid after the
copy as discussed in the note below. 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>
<para>
Please note: when you copy objects from one
<classname>QPDF</classname> to another, the source
<classname>QPDF</classname> object must remain valid until you
have finished with the destination object. This is because the
original object is still used to retrieve any referenced stream
data from the copied object.
</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 &ldquo;notional&rdquo;
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 &ldquo;Linearized PDF Document
Structure&rdquo; 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 = &lt;STDIN&gt;;
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 &gt; 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
&ldquo;compressed objects&rdquo; 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
&ldquo;<literal>1</literal>&rdquo;. All other default values are
&ldquo;<literal>0</literal>&rdquo;.
</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>
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</para>
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<para>
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</para>
</listitem>
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</para>
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</para>
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<varlistentry>
<term>10.4.0: Month dd, YYYY</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Handling of Weak Cryptography Algorithms
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
From the qpdf CLI, the <option>--allow-weak-crypto</option>
is now required to suppress a warning when explicitly
creating PDF files using RC4 encryption. While qpdf will
always retain the ability to read and write such files,
doing so will require explicit acknowledgment moving
forward. For qpdf 10.4, this change only affects the
command-line tool. Starting in qpdf 11, there will be small
API changes to require explicit acknowledgment in those
cases as well. For additional information, see <xref
linkend="ref.weak-crypto"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix potential bounds error when handling shell completion
that could occur when given bogus input.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Properly handle overlay/underlay on completely empty pages
(with no resource dictionary).
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix crash that could occur under certain conditions when
using <option>--pages</option> with files that had form
fields.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Make <function>QPDF::findPage</function> functions public.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add methods to <classname>Pl_Flate</classname> to be able to
receive warnings on certain recoverable conditions.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add an extra check to the library to detect when foreign
objects are inserted directly (instead of using
<function>QPDF::copyForeignObject</function>) at the time of
insertion rather than when the file is written. Catching the
error sooner makes it much easier to locate the incorrect
code.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Improve diagnostics around parsing <option>--pages</option>
command-line options
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Packaging Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The Windows binary distribution is now built with crypto
provided by OpenSSL 3.0.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.3.2: May 8, 2021</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
When generating a file while preserving object streams,
unreferenced objects are correctly removed unless
<option>--preserve-unreferenced</option> is specified.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
When adding a page that already exists, make a shallow copy
instead of throwing an exception. This makes the library
behavior consistent with the CLI behavior. See
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> for additional notes.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.3.1: March 11, 2021</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Form field copying failed on files where /DR was a direct
object in the document-level form dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.3.0: March 4, 2021</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The code for handling form fields when copying pages from
10.2.0 was not quite right and didn't work in a number of
situations, such as when the same page was copied multiple
times or when there were conflicting resource or field names
across multiple copies. The 10.3.0 code has been much more
thoroughly tested with more complex cases and with a
multitude of readers and should be much closer to correct.
The 10.2.0 code worked well enough for page splitting or for
copying pages with form fields into documents that didn't
already have them but was still not quite correct in
handling of field-level resources.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When <function>QPDF::replaceObject</function> or
<function>QPDF::swapObjects</function> is called, existing
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> instances no longer
point to the old objects. The next time they are
accessed, they automatically notice the change to the
underlying object and update themselves. This resolves a
very longstanding source of confusion, albeit in a very
rarely used method call.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix form field handling code to look for default
appearances, quadding, and default resources in the right
places. The code was not looking for things in the
document-level interactive form dictionary that it was
supposed to be finding there. This required adding a few new
methods to <classname>QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper</classname>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Reworked the code that handles copying annotations and form
fields during page operations. There were additional methods
added to the public API from 10.2.0 and a one deprecation of
a method added in 10.2.0. The majority of the API changes
are in methods most people would never call and that will
hopefully be superseded by higher-level interfaces for
handling page copies. Please see the
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> file for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The method <function>QPDF::numWarnings</function> was added
so that you can tell whether any warnings happened during a
specific block of code.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.2.0: February 23, 2021</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Behavior Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Operations that work on combining pages are much better
about protecting form fields. In particular,
<option>--split-pages</option> and <option>--pages</option>
now preserve interaction form functionality by copying the
relevant form field information from the original files.
Additionally, if you use <option>--pages</option> to select
only some pages from the original input file, unused form
fields are removed, which prevents lots of unused
annotations from being retained.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
By default, <command>qpdf</command> no longer allows
creation of encrypted PDF files whose user password is
non-empty and owner password is empty when a 256-bit key is
in use. The <option>--allow-insecure</option> option,
specified inside the <option>--encrypt</option> options,
allows creation of such files. Behavior changes in the CLI
are avoided when possible, but an exception was made here
because this is security-related. qpdf must always allow
creation of weird files for testing purposes, but it should
not default to letting users unknowingly create insecure
files.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Behavior Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Note: the changes in this section cause differences in
output in some cases. These differences change the syntax of
the PDF but do not change the semantics (meaning). I make a
strong effort to avoid gratuitous changes in qpdf's output
so that qpdf changes don't break people's tests. In this
case, the changes significantly improve the readability of
the generated PDF and don't affect any output that's
generated by simple transformation. If you are annoyed by
having to update test files, please rest assured that
changes like this have been and will continue to be rare
events.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::newUnicodeString</function> now
uses whichever of ASCII, PDFDocEncoding, of UTF-16 is
sufficient to encode all the characters in the string. This
reduces needless encoding in UTF-16 of strings that can be
encoded in ASCII. This change may cause qpdf to generate
different output than before when form field values are set
using <classname>QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper</classname> but
does not change the meaning of the output.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The code that places form XObjects and also the code that
flattens rotations trim trailing zeroes from real numbers
that they calculate. This causes slight (but semantically
equivalent) differences in generated appearance streams and
form XObject invocations in overlay/underlay code or in user
code that calls the methods that place form XObjects on a
page.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new command line options for listing, saving, adding,
removing, and and copying file attachments. See <xref
linkend="ref.attachments"/> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Page splitting and merging operations, as well as
<option>--flatten-rotation</option>, are better behaved
with respect to annotations and interactive form fields. In
most cases, interactive form field functionality and proper
formatting and functionality of annotations is preserved by
these operations. There are still some cases that aren't
perfect, such as when functionality of annotations depends
on document-level data that qpdf doesn't yet understand or
when there are problems with referential integrity among
form fields and annotations (e.g., when a single form field
object or its associated annotations are shared across
multiple pages, a case that is out of spec but that works in
most viewers anyway).
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The option
<option>--password-file=<replaceable>filename</replaceable></option>
can now be used to read the decryption password from a file.
You can use <literal>-</literal> as the file name to read
the password from standard input. This is an easier/more
obvious way to read passwords from files or standard input
than using <option>@file</option> for this purpose.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add some information about attachments to the json output,
and added <literal>attachments</literal> as an additional
json key. The information included here is limited to the
preferred name and content stream and a reference to the
file spec object. This is enough detail for clients to avoid
the hassle of navigating a name tree and provides what is
needed for basic enumeration and extraction of attachments.
More detailed information can be obtained by following the
reference to the file spec object.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add numeric option to <option>--collate</option>. If
<option>--collate=<replaceable>n</replaceable></option> is
given, take pages in groups of <replaceable>n</replaceable>
from the given files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
It is now valid to provide <option>--rotate=0</option> to
clear rotation from a page.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
This release includes numerous additions to the API. Not all
changes are listed here. Please see the
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> file in the source
distribution for a comprehensive list. Highlights appear
below.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>QPDFObjectHandle::ditems()</function> and
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::aitems()</function> that enable
C++-style iteration, including range-for iteration, over
dictionary and array QPDFObjectHandles. See comments in
<filename>include/qpdf/QPDFObjectHandle.hh</filename> and
<filename>examples/pdf-name-number-tree.cc</filename> for
details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>QPDFObjectHandle::copyStream</function> for
making a copy of a stream within the same
<classname>QPDF</classname> instance.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new helper classes for supporting file attachments, also
known as embedded files. New classes are
<classname>QPDFEmbeddedFileDocumentHelper</classname>,
<classname>QPDFFileSpecObjectHelper</classname>, and
<classname>QPDFEFStreamObjectHelper</classname>. See their
respective headers for details and
<filename>examples/pdf-attach-file.cc</filename> for an
example.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add a version of
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::parse</function> that takes a
<classname>QPDF</classname> pointer as context so that it
can parse strings containing indirect object references.
This is illustrated in
<filename>examples/pdf-attach-file.cc</filename>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Re-implement <classname>QPDFNameTreeObjectHelper</classname>
and <classname>QPDFNumberTreeObjectHelper</classname> to be
more efficient, add an iterator-based API, give them the
capability to repair broken trees, and create methods for
modifying the trees. With this change, qpdf has a robust
read/write implementation of name and number trees.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new versions of
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::replaceStreamData</function>
that take <classname>std::function</classname> objects for
cases when you need something between a static string and a
full-fledged StreamDataProvider. Using this with
<function>QUtil::file_provider</function> is a very easy way
to create a stream from the contents of a file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <classname>QPDFMatrix</classname> class, formerly a
private, internal class, has been added to the public API.
See <filename>include/qpdf/QPDFMatrix.hh</filename> for
details. This class is for working with transformation
matrices. Some methods in
<classname>QPDFPageObjectHelper</classname> make use of this
to make information about transformation matrices available.
For an example, see
<filename>examples/pdf-overlay-page.cc</filename>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Several new methods were added to
<classname>QPDFAcroFormDocumentHelper</classname> for
adding, removing, getting information about, and enumerating
form fields.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFAcroFormDocumentHelper::transformAnnotations</function>,
which applies a transformation to each annotation on a page.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::copyAnnotations</function>,
which copies annotations and, if applicable, associated form
fields, from one page to another, possibly transforming the
rectangles.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Build Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
A C++-14 compiler is now required to build qpdf. There is no
intention to require anything newer than that for a while.
C++-14 includes modest enhancements to C++-11 and appears to
be supported about as widely as C++-11.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--flatten-rotation</option> option applies
transformations to any annotations that may be on the page.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If a form XObject lacks a resources dictionary, consider any
names in that form XObject to be referenced from the
containing page. This is compliant with older PDF versions.
Also detect if any form XObjects have any unresolved names
and, if so, don't remove unreferenced resources from them or
from the page that contains them. Unfortunately this has the
side effect of preventing removal of unreferenced resources
in some cases where names appear that don't refer to
resources, such as with tagged PDF. This is a bit of a
corner case that is not likely to cause a significant
problem in practice, but the only side effect would be lack
of removal of shared resources. A future version of qpdf may
be more sophisticated in its detection of names that refer
to resources.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Properly handle strings if they appear in inline image
dictionaries while externalizing inline images.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.1.0: January 5, 2021</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <option>--flatten-rotation</option> command-line option,
which causes all pages that are rotated using parameters in
the page's dictionary to instead be identically rotated in
the page's contents. The change is not user-visible for
compliant PDF readers but can be used to work around broken
PDF applications that don't properly handle page rotation.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Support for user-provided (pluggable, modular) stream
filters. It is now possible to derive a class from
<classname>QPDFStreamFilter</classname> and register it with
<classname>QPDF</classname> so that regular library methods,
including those used by <classname>QPDFWriter</classname>,
can decode streams with filters not directly supported by
the library. The example
<filename>examples/pdf-custom-filter.cc</filename>
illustrates how to use this capability.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add methods to <classname>QPDFPageObjectHelper</classname>
to iterate through XObjects on a page or form XObjects,
possibly recursing into nested form XObjects:
<function>forEachXObject</function>,
<function>ForEachImage</function>,
<function>forEachFormXObject</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhance several methods in
<classname>QPDFPageObjectHelper</classname> to work with
form XObjects as well as pages, as noted in comments. See
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> for a full list.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Rename some functions in
<classname>QPDFPageObjectHelper</classname>, while keeping
old names for compatibility:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>getPageImages</function> to
<function>getImages</function>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>filterPageContents</function> to
<function>filterContents</function>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>pipePageContents</function> to
<function>pipeContents</function>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>parsePageContents</function> to
<function>parseContents</function>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::getFormXObjects</function>
to return a map of form XObjects directly on a page or form
XObject
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new helper methods to
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>:
<function>isFormXObject</function>, <function>isImage</function>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add the optional <function>allow_streams</function>
parameter <function>QPDFObjectHandle::makeDirect</function>.
When <function>QPDFObjectHandle::makeDirect</function> is
called in this way, it preserves references to streams
rather than throwing an exception.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>QPDFObjectHandle::setFilterOnWrite</function>
method. Calling this on a stream prevents
<function>QPDFWriter</function> from attempting to
uncompress, recompress, or otherwise filter a stream even if
it could. Developers can use this to protect streams that
are optimized should be protected from
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname>'s default behavior for any
other reason.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <classname>ostream</classname>
<literal>&lt;&lt;</literal> operator for
<classname>QPDFObjGen</classname>. This is useful to have
for debugging.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::flattenRotation</function>,
which replaces a page's <literal>/Rotate</literal> keyword
by rotating the page within the content stream and altering
the page's bounding boxes so the rendering is the same. This
can be used to work around buggy PDF readers that can't
properly handle page rotation.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
C API Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add several new functions to the C API for working with
objects. These are wrappers around many of the methods in
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname>. Their inclusion
adds considerable new capability to the C API.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>qpdf_register_progress_reporter</function> to
the C API, corresponding to
<function>QPDFWriter::registerProgressReporter</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Performance Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Improve steps <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> takes to
prepare a <classname>QPDF</classname> object for writing,
resulting in about an 8% improvement in write performance
while allowing indirect objects to appear in
<literal>/DecodeParms</literal>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When extracting pages, the <command>qpdf</command> CLI only
removes unreferenced resources from the pages that are being
kept, resulting in a significant performance improvement
when extracting small numbers of pages from large, complex
documents.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::externalizeInlineImages</function>
was not externalizing images referenced from form XObjects
that appeared on the page.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::filterPageContents</function>
was broken for pages with multiple content streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Tweak zsh completion code to behave a little better with
respect to path completion.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.0.4: November 21, 2020</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix a handful of integer overflows. This includes cases
found by fuzzing as well as having qpdf not do range
checking on unused values in the xref stream.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.0.3: October 31, 2020</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The fix to the bug involving copying streams with indirect
filters was incorrect and introduced a new, more serious
bug. The original bug has been fixed correctly, as has the
bug introduced in 10.0.2.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.0.2: October 27, 2020</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
When concatenating content streams, as with
<option>--coalesce-contents</option>, there were cases in
which qpdf would merge two lexical tokens together, creating
invalid results. A newline is now inserted between
merged content streams if one is not already present.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix an internal error that could occur when copying foreign
streams whose stream data had been replaced using a stream
data provider if those streams had indirect filters or
decode parameters. This is a rare corner case.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Ensure that the caller's locale settings do not change the
results of numeric conversions performed internally by the
qpdf library. Note that the problem here could only be
caused when the qpdf library was used programmatically.
Using the qpdf CLI already ignored the user's locale for
numeric conversion.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix several instances in which warnings were not suppressed
in spite of <option>--no-warn</option> and/or errors or
warnings were written to standard output rather than
standard error.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fixed a memory leak that could occur under specific
circumstances when
<option>--object-streams=generate</option> was used.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix various integer overflows and similar conditions found
by the OSS-Fuzz project.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
New option <option>--warning-exit-0</option> causes qpdf to
exit with a status of <literal>0</literal> rather than
<literal>3</literal> if there are warnings but no errors.
Combine with <option>--no-warn</option> to completely ignore
warnings.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Performance improvements have been made to
<function>QPDF::processMemoryFile</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The OpenSSL crypto provider produces more detailed error
messages.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Build Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The option <option>--disable-rpath</option> is now supported
by qpdf's <command>./configure</command> script. Some
distributions' packaging standards recommended the use of
this option.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Selection of a printf format string for <type>long
long</type> has been moved from <literal>ifdefs</literal> to
an autoconf test. If you are using your own build system,
you will need to provide a value for
<literal>LL_FMT</literal> in
<filename>libqpdf/qpdf/qpdf-config.h</filename>, which would
typically be <literal>&quot;%lld&quot;</literal> or, for
some Windows compilers, <literal>&quot;%I64d&quot;</literal>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Several improvements were made to build-time configuration
of the OpenSSL crypto provider.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A nearly stand-alone Linux binary zip file is now included
with the qpdf release. This is built on an older (but
supported) Ubuntu LTS release, but would work on most
reasonably recent Linux distributions. It contains only the
executables and required shared libraries that would not be
present on a minimal system. It can be used for including
qpdf in a minimal environment, such as a docker container.
The zip file is also known to work as a layer in AWS Lambda.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF's automated build has been migrated from Azure
Pipelines to GitHub Actions.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Windows-specific Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The Windows executables distributed with qpdf releases now
use the OpenSSL crypto provider by default. The native
crypto provider is also compiled in and can be selected at
runtime with the <literal>QPDF_CRYPTO_PROVIDER</literal>
environment variable.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Improvements have been made to how a cryptographic provider
is obtained in the native Windows crypto implementation.
However mostly this is shadowed by OpenSSL being used by
default.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.0.1: April 9, 2020</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
10.0.0 introduced a bug in which calling
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getStreamData</function> on a
stream that can't be filtered was returning the raw data
instead of throwing an exception. This is now fixed.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix a bug that was preventing qpdf from linking with some
versions of clang on some platforms.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Improve the <filename>pdf-invert-images</filename> example
to avoid having to load all the images into RAM at the same
time.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>10.0.0: April 6, 2020</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Performance Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The qpdf library and executable should run much faster in
this version than in the last several releases. Several
internal library optimizations have been made, and there has
been improved behavior on page splitting as well. This
version of qpdf should outperform any of the 8.x or 9.x
versions.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Incompatible API (source-level) Changes (minor)
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The <function>QUtil::srandom</function> method was removed.
It didn't do anything unless insecure random numbers were
compiled in, and they have been off by default for a long
time. If you were calling it, just remove the call since it
wasn't doing anything anyway.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Build/Packaging Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add a <literal>openssl</literal> crypto provider, which is
implemented with OpenSSL and also works with BoringSSL.
Thanks to Dean Scarff for this contribution. If you maintain
qpdf for a distribution, pay special attention to make sure
that you are including support for the crypto providers you
want. Package maintainers will have to weigh the advantages
of allowing users to pick a crypto provider at runtime
against the disadvantages of adding more dependencies to
qpdf.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Allow qpdf to built on stripped down systems whose C/C++
libraries lack the <classname>wchar_t</classname> type.
Search for <classname>wchar_t</classname> in qpdf's
README.md for details. This should be very rare, but it is
known to be helpful in some embedded environments.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <literal>objectinfo</literal> key to the JSON output.
This will be a place to put computed metadata or other
information about PDF objects that are not immediately
evident in other ways or that seem useful for some other
reason. In this version, information is provided about each
object indicating whether it is a stream and, if so, what
its length and filters are. Without this, it was not
possible to tell conclusively from the JSON output alone
whether or not an object was a stream. Run <command>qpdf
--json-help</command> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new option
<option>--remove-unreferenced-resources</option> which takes
<literal>auto</literal>, <literal>yes</literal>, or
<literal>no</literal> as arguments. The new
<literal>auto</literal> mode, which is the default, performs
a fast heuristic over a PDF file when splitting pages to
determine whether the expensive process of finding and
removing unreferenced resources is likely to be of benefit.
For most files, this new default will result in a
significant performance improvement for splitting pages. See
<xref linkend="ref.advanced-transformation"/> for a more
detailed discussion.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--preserve-unreferenced-resources</option> is
now just a synonym for
<option>--remove-unreferenced-resources=no</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If the <literal>QPDF_EXECUTABLE</literal> environment
variable is set when invoking <command>qpdf
--bash-completion</command> or <command>qpdf
--zsh-completion</command>, the completion command that it
outputs will refer to qpdf using the value of that variable
rather than what <command>qpdf</command> determines its
executable path to be. This can be useful when wrapping
<command>qpdf</command> with a script, working with a
version in the source tree, using an AppImage, or other
situations where there is some indirection.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Random number generation is now delegated to the crypto
provider. The old behavior is still used by the native
crypto provider. It is still possible to provide your own
random number generator.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add a new version of
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::StreamDataProvider::provideStreamData</function>
that accepts the <function>suppress_warnings</function> and
<function>will_retry</function> options and allows a success
code to be returned. This makes it possible to implement a
<classname>StreamDataProvider</classname> that calls
<function>pipeStreamData</function> on another stream and to
pass the response back to the caller, which enables better
error handling on those proxied streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Update <function>QPDFObjectHandle::pipeStreamData</function>
to return an overall success code that goes beyond whether
or not filtered data was written successfully. This allows
better error handling of cases that were not filtering
errors. You have to call this explicitly. Methods in
previously existing APIs have the same semantics as before.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::placeFormXObject</function>
method now allows separate control over whether it should be
willing to shrink or expand objects to fit them better into
the destination rectangle. The previous behavior was that
shrinking was allowed but expansion was not. The previous
behavior is still the default.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When calling the C API, any non-zero value passed to a
boolean parameter is treated as <literal>TRUE</literal>.
Previously only the value <literal>1</literal> was accepted.
This makes the C API behave more like most C interfaces and
is known to improve compatibility with some Windows
environments that dynamically load the DLL and call
functions from it.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>QPDFObjectHandle::unsafeShallowCopy</function>
for copying only top-level dictionary keys or array items.
This is unsafe because it creates a situation in which
changing a lower-level item in one object may also change it
in another object, but for cases in which you
<emphasis>know</emphasis> you are only inserting or
replacing top-level items, it is much faster than
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::shallowCopy</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>QPDFObjectHandle::filterAsContents</function>,
which filter's a stream's data as a content stream. This is
useful for parsing the contents for form XObjects in the
same way as parsing page content streams.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
When detecting and removing unreferenced resources during
page splitting, traverse into form XObjects and handle their
resources dictionaries as well.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The same error recovery is applied to streams in other than
the primary input file when merging or splitting pages.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>9.1.1: January 26, 2020</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Build/Packaging Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The fix-qdf program was converted from perl to C++. As such,
qpdf no longer has a runtime dependency on perl.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Added new helper routine
<function>QUtil::call_main_from_wmain</function> which
converts <type>wchar_t</type> arguments to UTF-8 encoded
strings. This is useful for qpdf because library methods
expect file names to be UTF-8 encoded, even on Windows
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Added new <function>QUtil::read_lines_from_file</function>
methods that take <type>FILE*</type> arguments and that
allow preservation of end-of-line characters. This also
fixes a bug where
<function>QUtil::read_lines_from_file</function> wouldn't
work properly with Unicode filenames.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Added options <option>--is-encrypted</option> and
<option>--requires-password</option> for testing whether a
file is encrypted or requires a password other than the
supplied (or empty) password. These communicate via exit
status, making them useful for shell scripts. They also work
on encrypted files with unknown passwords.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Added <literal>encrypt</literal> key to JSON options. With
the exception of the reconstructed user password for older
encryption formats, this provides the same information as
<option>--show-encryption</option> but in a consistent,
parseable format. See output of <command>qpdf
--json-help</command> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
In QDF mode, be sure not to write more than one XRef stream
to a file, even when
<option>--preserve-unreferenced</option> is used.
<command>fix-qdf</command> assumes that there is only one
XRef stream, and that it appears at the end of the file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When externalizing inline images, properly handle images
whose color space is a reference to an object in the page's
resource dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Windows-specific fix for acquiring crypt context with a new
keyset.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>9.1.0: November 17, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Build Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
A C++-11 compiler is now required to build qpdf.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A new crypto provider that uses gnutls for crypto functions
is now available and can be enabled at build time. See <xref
linkend="ref.crypto"/> for more information about crypto
providers and <xref linkend="ref.crypto.build"/> for
specific information about the build.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Incorporate contribution from Masamichi Hosoda to properly
handle signature dictionaries by not including them in
object streams, formatting the <literal>Contents</literal>
key has a hexadecimal string, and excluding the
<literal>/Contents</literal> key from encryption and
decryption.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Incorporate contribution from Masamichi Hosoda to provide
new API calls for getting file-level information about
input and output files, enabling certain operations on
the files at the file level rather than the object level.
New methods include
<function>QPDF::getXRefTable()</function>,
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getParsedOffset()</function>,
<function>QPDFWriter::getRenumberedObjGen(QPDFObjGen)</function>,
and <function>QPDFWriter::getWrittenXRefTable()</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Support build-time and runtime selectable crypto providers.
This includes the addition of new classes
<classname>QPDFCryptoProvider</classname> and
<classname>QPDFCryptoImpl</classname> and the recognition
of the <literal>QPDF_CRYPTO_PROVIDER</literal> environment
variable. Crypto providers are described in depth in <xref
linkend="ref.crypto"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Addition of the <option>--show-crypto</option> option in
support of selectable crypto providers, as described in
<xref linkend="ref.crypto"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Allow <literal>:even</literal> or <literal>:odd</literal> to
be appended to numeric ranges for specification of the even
or odd pages from among the pages specified in the range.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix shell wildcard expansion behavior (<literal>*</literal>
and <literal>?</literal>) of the <command>qpdf.exe</command>
as built my MSVC.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>9.0.2: October 12, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fix
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix the name of the temporary file used by
<option>--replace-input</option> so that it doesn't require
path splitting and works with paths include directories.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>9.0.1: September 20, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes/Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix some build and test issues on big-endian systems and
compilers with characters that are unsigned by default.
The problems were in build and test only. There were no
actual bugs in the qpdf library itself relating to
endianness or unsigned characters.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When a dictionary has a duplicated key, report this with a
warning. The behavior of the library in this case is
unchanged, but the error condition is no longer silently
ignored.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When a form field's display rectangle is erroneously
specified with inverted coordinates, detect and correct this
situation. This avoids some form fields from being flipped
when flattening annotations on files with this condition.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>9.0.0: August 31, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Incompatible API (source-level) Changes (minor)
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The method <function>QUtil::strcasecmp</function> has been
renamed to <function>QUtil::str_compare_nocase</function>.
This incompatible change is necessary to enable qpdf to
build on platforms that define
<function>strcasecmp</function> as a macro.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <function>QPDF::copyForeignObject</function> method had
an overloaded version that took a boolean parameter that was
not used. If you were using this version, just omit the
extra parameter.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
There was a version
<function>QPDFTokenizer::expectInlineImage</function> that
took no arguments. This version has been removed since it
caused the tokenizer to return incorrect inline images. A
new version was added some time ago that produces correct
output. This is a very low level method that doesn't make
sense to call outside of qpdf's lexical engine. There are
higher level methods for tokenizing content streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Change
<function>QPDFOutlineDocumentHelper::getTopLevelOutlines</function>
and <function>QPDFOutlineObjectHelper::getKids</function> to
return a <type>std::vector</type> instead of a
<type>std::list</type> of
<classname>QPDFOutlineObjectHelper</classname> objects.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Remove method
<function>QPDFTokenizer::allowPoundAnywhereInName</function>.
This function would allow creation of name tokens whose
value would change when unparsed, which is never the correct
behavior.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
CLI Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--replace-input</option> option may be given in
place of an output file name. This causes qpdf to overwrite
the input file with the output. See the description of
<option>--replace-input</option> in <xref
linkend="ref.basic-options"/> for more details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--recompress-flate</option> instructs
<command>qpdf</command> to recompress streams that are
already compressed with <literal>/FlateDecode</literal>.
Useful with <option>--compression-level</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The
<option>--compression-level=<replaceable>level</replaceable></option>
sets the zlib compression level used for any streams
compressed by <literal>/FlateDecode</literal>. Most
effective when combined with
<option>--recompress-flate</option>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
A new namespace <classname>QIntC</classname>, provided by
<filename>qpdf/QIntC.hh</filename>, provides safe conversion
methods between different integer types. These conversion
methods do range checking to ensure that the cast can be
performed with no loss of information. Every use of
<function>static_cast</function> in the library was
inspected to see if it could use one of these safe
converters instead. See <xref linkend="ref.casting"/> for
additional details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Method <function>QPDF::anyWarnings</function> tells whether
there have been any warnings without clearing the list of
warnings.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Method <function>QPDF::closeInputSource</function> closes or
otherwise releases the input source. This enables the input
file to be deleted or renamed.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New methods have been added to <classname>QUtil</classname>
for converting back and forth between strings and unsigned
integers: <function>uint_to_string</function>,
<function>uint_to_string_base</function>,
<function>string_to_uint</function>, and
<function>string_to_ull</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New methods have been added to
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> that return the
value of <classname>Integer</classname> objects as
<type>int</type> or <type>unsigned int</type> with range
checking and sensible fallback values, and a new method was
added to return an unsigned value. This makes it easier to
write code that is safe from unintentional data loss.
Functions: <function>getUIntValue</function>,
<function>getIntValueAsInt</function>,
<function>getUIntValueAsUInt</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When parsing content streams with
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle::ParserCallbacks</classname>, in
place of the method
<function>handleObject(QPDFObjectHandle)</function>, the
developer may override
<function>handleObject(QPDFObjectHandle, size_t offset,
size_t length)</function>. If this method is defined, it
will be invoked with the object along with its offset and
length within the overall contents being parsed. Intervening
spaces and comments are not included in offset and length.
Additionally, a new method
<function>contentSize(size_t)</function> may be implemented.
If present, it will be called prior to the first call to
<function>handleObject</function> with the total size in
bytes of the combined contents.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New methods <function>QPDF::userPasswordMatched</function>
and <function>QPDF::ownerPasswordMatched</function> have
been added to enable a caller to determine whether the
supplied password was the user password, the owner password,
or both. This information is also displayed by <command>qpdf
--show-encryption</command> and <command>qpdf
--check</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Static method
<function>Pl_Flate::setCompressionLevel</function> can be
called to set the zlib compression level globally used by
all instances of Pl_Flate in deflate mode.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The method
<function>QPDFWriter::setRecompressFlate</function> can be
called to tell <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> to
uncompress and recompress streams already compressed with
<literal>/FlateDecode</literal>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The underlying implementation of QPDF arrays has been
enhanced to be much more memory efficient when dealing with
arrays with lots of nulls. This enables qpdf to use
drastically less memory for certain types of files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When traversing the pages tree, if nodes are encountered
with invalid types, the types are fixed, and a warning is
issued.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A new helper method
<function>QUtil::read_file_into_memory</function> was added.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
All conditions previously reported by
<function>QPDF::checkLinearization()</function> as errors
are now presented as warnings.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Name tokens containing the <literal>#</literal> character
not preceded by two hexadecimal digits, which is invalid in
PDF 1.2 and above, are properly handled by the library: a
warning is generated, and the name token is properly
preserved, even if invalid, in the output. See
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> for a more complete
description of this change.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
A small handful of memory issues, assertion failures, and
unhandled exceptions that could occur on badly mangled input
files have been fixed. Most of these problems were found by
Google's OSS-Fuzz project.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When <command>qpdf --check</command> or <command>qpdf
--check-linearization</command> encounters a file with
linearization warnings but not errors, it now properly exits
with exit code 3 instead of 2.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--completion-bash</option> and
<option>--completion-zsh</option> options now work properly
when qpdf is invoked as an AppImage.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Calling
<function>QPDFWriter::set*EncryptionParameters</function> on
a <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> object whose output
filename has not yet been set no longer produces a
segmentation fault.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When reading encrypted files, follow the spec more closely
regarding encryption key length. This allows qpdf to open
encrypted files in most cases when they have invalid or
missing /Length keys in the encryption dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Build Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
On platforms that support it, qpdf now builds with
<option>-fvisibility=hidden</option>. If you build qpdf with
your own build system, this is now safe to use. This
prevents methods that are not part of the public API from
being exported by the shared library, and makes qpdf's ELF
shared libraries (used on Linux, MacOS, and most other UNIX
flavors) behave more like the Windows DLL. Since the DLL
already behaves in much this way, it is unlikely that there
are any methods that were accidentally not exported.
However, with ELF shared libraries, typeinfo for some
classes has to be explicitly exported. If there are problems
in dynamically linked code catching exceptions or
subclassing, this could be the reason. If you see this,
please report a bug at <ulink
url="https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/">https://github.com/qpdf/qpdf/issues/</ulink>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF is now compiled with integer conversion and sign
conversion warnings enabled. Numerous changes were made to
the library to make this safe.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF's <command>make install</command> target explicitly
specifies the mode to use when installing files instead of
relying the user's umask. It was previously doing this for
some files but not others.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If <command>pkg-config</command> is available, use it to
locate <filename>libjpeg</filename> and
<filename>zlib</filename> dependencies, falling back on old
behavior if unsuccessful.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Other Notes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF has been fully integrated into <ulink
url="https://github.com/google/oss-fuzz">Google's OSS-Fuzz
project</ulink>. This project exercises code with randomly
mutated inputs and is great for discovering hidden security
crashes and security issues. Several bugs found by oss-fuzz
have already been fixed in qpdf.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.4.2: May 18, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<para>
This release has just one change: correction of a buffer overrun
in the Windows code used to open files. Windows users should
take this update. There are no code changes that affect
non-Windows releases.
</para>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.4.1: April 27, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
When <command>qpdf --version</command> is run, it will
detect if the qpdf CLI was built with a different version of
qpdf than the library, which may indicate a problem with the
installation.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New option <option>--remove-page-labels</option> will remove page
labels before generating output. This used to happen if you
ran <command>qpdf --empty --pages .. --</command>, but the
behavior changed in qpdf 8.3.0. This option enables people
who were relying on the old behavior to get it again.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New option
<option>--keep-files-open-threshold=<replaceable>count</replaceable></option>
can be used to override number of files that qpdf will use
to trigger the behavior of not keeping all files open when
merging files. This may be necessary if your system allows
fewer than the default value of 200 files to be open at the
same time.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Handle Unicode characters in filenames on Windows. The
changes to support Unicode on the CLI in Windows broke
Unicode filenames for Windows.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Slightly tighten logic that determines whether an object is
a page. This should resolve problems in some rare files
where some non-page objects were passing qpdf's test for
whether something was a page, thus causing them to be
erroneously lost during page splitting operations.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Revert change that included preservation of outlines
(bookmarks) in <option>--split-pages</option>. The way it
was implemented in 8.3.0 and 8.4.0 caused a very significant
degradation of performance for splitting certain files. A
future release of qpdf may re-introduce the behavior in a
more performant and also more correct fashion.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
In JSON mode, add missing leading 0 to decimal values
between -1 and 1 even if not present in the input. The JSON
specification requires the leading 0. The PDF specification
does not.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.4.0: February 1, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Command-line Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Non-compatible CLI change:</emphasis> The qpdf
command-line tool interprets passwords given at the
command-line differently from previous releases when the
passwords contain non-ASCII characters. In some cases, the
behavior differs from previous releases. For a discussion of
the current behavior, please see <xref
linkend="ref.unicode-passwords"/>. The incompatibilities are
as follows:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
On Windows, qpdf now receives all command-line options as
Unicode strings if it can figure out the appropriate
compile/link options. This is enabled at least for MSVC
and mingw builds. That means that if non-ASCII strings
are passed to the qpdf CLI in Windows, qpdf will now
correctly receive them. In the past, they would have
either been encoded as Windows code page 1252 (also known
as &ldquo;Windows ANSI&rdquo; or as something
unintelligible. In almost all cases, qpdf is able to
properly interpret Unicode arguments now, whereas in the
past, it would almost never interpret them properly. The
result is that non-ASCII passwords given to the qpdf CLI
on Windows now have a much greater chance of creating PDF
files that can be opened by a variety of readers. In the
past, usually files encrypted from the Windows CLI using
non-ASCII passwords would not be readable by most
viewers. Note that the current version of qpdf is able to
decrypt files that it previously created using the
previously supplied password.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The PDF specification requires passwords to be encoded as
UTF-8 for 256-bit encryption and with PDF Doc encoding
for 40-bit or 128-bit encryption. Older versions of qpdf
left it up to the user to provide passwords with the
correct encoding. The qpdf CLI now detects when a
password is given with UTF-8 encoding and automatically
transcodes it to what the PDF spec requires. While this
is almost always the correct behavior, it is possible to
override the behavior if there is some reason to do so.
This is discussed in more depth in <xref
linkend="ref.unicode-passwords"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New options <option>--externalize-inline-images</option>,
<option>--ii-min-bytes</option>, and
<option>--keep-inline-images</option> control qpdf's
handling of inline images and possible conversion of them to
regular images. By default,
<option>--optimize-images</option> now also applies to
inline images. These options are discussed in <xref
linkend="ref.advanced-transformation"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add options <option>--overlay</option> and
<option>--underlay</option> for overlaying or underlaying
pages of other files onto output pages. See <xref
linkend="ref.overlay-underlay"/> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When opening an encrypted file with a password, if the
specified password doesn't work and the password contains
any non-ASCII characters, qpdf will try a number of
alternative passwords to try to compensate for possible
character encoding errors. This behavior can be suppressed
with the <option>--suppress-password-recovery</option>
option. See <xref linkend="ref.unicode-passwords"/> for a
full discussion.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add the <option>--password-mode</option> option to fine-tune
how qpdf interprets password arguments, especially when they
contain non-ASCII characters. See <xref
linkend="ref.unicode-passwords"/> for more information.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
In the <option>--pages</option> option, it is now possible
to copy the same page more than once from the same file
without using the previous workaround of specifying two
different paths to the same file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
In the <option>--pages</option> option, allow use of
&ldquo;.&rdquo; as a shortcut for the primary input file.
That way, you can do <command>qpdf in.pdf --pages . 1-2 --
out.pdf</command> instead of having to repeat
<filename>in.pdf</filename> in the command.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When encrypting with 128-bit and 256-bit encryption, new
encryption options <option>--assemble</option>,
<option>--annotate</option>, <option>--form</option>, and
<option>--modify-other</option> allow more fine-grained
granularity in configuring options. Before, the
<option>--modify</option> option only configured certain
predefined groups of permissions.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes and Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<emphasis>Potential data-loss bug:</emphasis> Versions of
qpdf between 8.1.0 and 8.3.0 had a bug that could cause page
splitting and merging operations to drop some font or image
resources if the PDF file's internal structure shared these
resource lists across pages and if some but not all of the
pages in the output did not reference all the fonts and
images. Using the
<option>--preserve-unreferenced-resources</option> option
would work around the incorrect behavior. This bug was the
result of a typo in the code and a deficiency in the test
suite. The case that triggered the error was known, just not
handled properly. This case is now exercised in qpdf's test
suite and properly handled.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When optimizing images, detect and refuse to optimize
images that can't be converted to JPEG because of bit depth
or color space.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Linearization and page manipulation APIs now detect and
recover from files that have duplicate Page objects in the
pages tree.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Using older option <option>--stream-data=compress</option>
with object streams, object streams and xref streams were
not compressed.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When the tokenizer returns inline image tokens, delimiters
following <literal>ID</literal> and <literal>EI</literal>
operators are no longer excluded. This makes it possible to
reliably extract the actual image data.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::externalizeInlineImages</function>
to convert inline images to regular images.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QUtil::possible_repaired_encodings()</function> to
generate a list of strings that represent other ways the
given string could have been encoded. This is the method the
QPDF CLI uses to generate the strings it tries when
recovering incorrectly encoded Unicode passwords.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new versions of
<function>QPDFWriter::setR{3,4,5,6}EncryptionParameters</function>
that allow more granular setting of permissions bits. See
<filename>QPDFWriter.hh</filename> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new versions of the transcoders from UTF-8 to
single-byte coding systems in <classname>QUtil</classname>
that report success or failure rather than just substituting
a specified unknown character.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method <function>QUtil::analyze_encoding()</function> to
determine whether a string has high-bit characters and is
appears to be UTF-16 or valid UTF-8 encoding.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::shallowCopyPage()</function>
to copy a new page that is a &ldquo;shallow copy&rdquo; of a
page. The resulting object is an indirect object ready to be
passed to
<function>QPDFPageDocumentHelper::addPage()</function> for
either the original <classname>QPDF</classname> object or a
different one. This is what the <command>qpdf</command>
command-line tool uses to copy the same page multiple times
from the same file during splitting and merging operations.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method <function>QPDF::getUniqueId()</function>, which
returns a unique identifier for the given QPDF object. The
identifier will be unique across the life of the
application. The returned value can be safely used as a map
key.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method <function>QPDF::setImmediateCopyFrom</function>.
This further enhances qpdf's ability to allow a
<classname>QPDF</classname> object from which objects are
being copied to go out of scope before the destination
object is written. If you call this method on a
<classname>QPDF</classname> instances, objects copied
<emphasis>from</emphasis> this instance will be copied
immediately instead of lazily. This option uses more memory
but allows the source object to go out of scope before the
destination object is written in all cases. See comments in
<filename>QPDF.hh</filename> for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::getAttribute</function> for
retrieving an attribute from the page dictionary taking
inheritance into consideration, and optionally making a copy
if your intention is to modify the attribute.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix long-standing limitation of
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::getPageImages</function> so
that it now properly reports images from inherited resources
dictionaries, eliminating the need to call
<function>QPDFPageDocumentHelper::pushInheritedAttributesToPage</function>
in this case.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getUniqueResourceName</function>
for finding an unused name in a resource dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::getFormXObjectForPage</function>
for generating a form XObject equivalent to a page. The
resulting object can be used in the same file or copied to
another file with <function>copyForeignObject</function>.
This can be useful for implementing underlay, overlay, n-up,
thumbnails, or any other functionality requiring replication
of pages in other contexts.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method
<function>QPDFPageObjectHelper::placeFormXObject</function>
for generating content stream text that places a given form
XObject on a page, centered and fit within a specified
rectangle. This method takes care of computing the proper
transformation matrix and may optionally compensate for
rotation or scaling of the destination page.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Build Improvements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new configure option
<option>--enable-avoid-windows-handle</option>, which causes
the preprocessor symbol
<literal>AVOID_WINDOWS_HANDLE</literal> to be defined. When
defined, qpdf will avoid referencing the Windows
<classname>HANDLE</classname> type, which is disallowed with
certain versions of the Windows SDK.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
For Windows builds, attempt to determine what options, if
any, have to be passed to the compiler and linker to enable
use of <function>wmain</function>. This causes the
preprocessor symbol <literal>WINDOWS_WMAIN</literal> to be
defined. If you do your own builds with other compilers, you
can define this symbol to cause <function>wmain</function>
to be used. This is needed to allow the Windows
<command>qpdf</command> command to receive Unicode
command-line options.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.3.0: January 7, 2019</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Command-line Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Shell completion: you can now use eval <command>$(qpdf
--completion-bash)</command> and eval <command>$(qpdf
--completion-zsh)</command> to enable shell completion for
bash and zsh.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Page numbers (also known as page labels) are now preserved
when merging and splitting files with the
<option>--pages</option> and <option>--split-pages</option>
options.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bookmarks are partially preserved when splitting pages with
the <option>--split-pages</option> option. Specifically, the
outlines dictionary and some supporting metadata are copied
into the split files. The result is that all bookmarks from
the original file appear, those that point to pages that are
preserved work, and those that point to pages that are not
preserved don't do anything. This is an interim step toward
proper support for bookmarks in splitting and merging
operations.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Page collation: add new option <option>--collate</option>.
When specified, the semantics of <option>--pages</option>
change from concatenation to collation. See <xref
linkend="ref.page-selection"/> for examples and discussion.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Generation of information in JSON format, primarily to
facilitate use of qpdf from languages other than C++. Add
new options <option>--json</option>,
<option>--json-key</option>, and
<option>--json-object</option> to generate a JSON
representation of the PDF file. Run <command>qpdf
--json-help</command> to get a description of the JSON
format. For more information, see <xref linkend="ref.json"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--generate-appearances</option> flag will cause
qpdf to generate appearances for form fields if the PDF file
indicates that form field appearances are out of date. This
can happen when PDF forms are filled in by a program that
doesn't know how to regenerate the appearances of the
filled-in fields.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--flatten-annotations</option> flag can be used
to <emphasis>flatten</emphasis> annotations, including form
fields. Ordinarily, annotations are drawn separately from
the page. Flattening annotations is the process of combining
their appearances into the page's contents. You might want
to do this if you are going to rotate or combine pages using
a tool that doesn't understand about annotations. You may
also want to use <option>--generate-appearances</option>
when using this flag since annotations for outdated form
fields are not flattened as that would cause loss of
information.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--optimize-images</option> flag tells qpdf to
recompresses every image using DCT (JPEG) compression as
long as the image is not already compressed with lossy
compression and recompressing the image reduces its size.
The additional options <option>--oi-min-width</option>,
<option>--oi-min-height</option>, and
<option>--oi-min-area</option> prevent recompression of
images whose width, height, or pixel area
(width&nbsp;&#xd7;&nbsp;height) are below a specified
threshold.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--show-object</option> option can now be given
as <option>--show-object=trailer</option> to show the
trailer dictionary.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes and Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF now automatically detects and recovers from dangling
references. If a PDF file contained an indirect reference to
a non-existent object, which is valid, when adding a new
object to the file, it was possible for the new object to
take the object ID of the dangling reference, thereby
causing the dangling reference to point to the new object.
This case is now prevented.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fixes to form field setting code: strings are always written
in UTF-16 format, and checkboxes and radio buttons are
handled properly with respect to synchronization of values
and appearance states.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <function>QPDF::checkLinearization()</function> no
longer causes the program to crash when it detects problems
with linearization data. Instead, it issues a normal warning
or error.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Ordinarily qpdf treats an argument of the form
<option>@file</option> to mean that command-line options
should be read from <filename>file</filename>. Now, if
<filename>file</filename> does not exist but
<filename>@file</filename> does, qpdf will treat
<filename>@file</filename> as a regular option. This makes
it possible to work more easily with PDF files whose names
happen to start with the <literal>@</literal> character.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Library Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Remove the restriction in most cases that the source QPDF
object used in a
<function>QPDF::copyForeignObject</function> call has to
stick around until the destination QPDF is written. The
exceptional case is when the source stream gets is data
using a QPDFObjectHandle::StreamDataProvider. For a more
in-depth discussion, see comments around
<function>copyForeignObject</function> in
<filename>QPDF.hh</filename>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method
<function>QPDFWriter::getFinalVersion()</function>, which
returns the PDF version that will ultimately be written to
the final file. See comments in
<filename>QPDFWriter.hh</filename> for some restrictions on
its use.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add several methods for transcoding strings to some of the
character sets used in PDF files:
<function>QUtil::utf8_to_ascii</function>,
<function>QUtil::utf8_to_win_ansi</function>,
<function>QUtil::utf8_to_mac_roman</function>, and
<function>QUtil::utf8_to_utf16</function>. For the
single-byte encodings that support only a limited character
sets, these methods replace unsupported characters with a
specified substitute.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new methods to
<classname>QPDFAnnotationObjectHelper</classname> and
<classname>QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper</classname> for
querying flags and interpretation of different field types.
Define constants in <filename>qpdf/Constants.h</filename> to
help with interpretation of flag values.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new methods
<function>QPDFAcroFormDocumentHelper::generateAppearancesIfNeeded</function>
and
<function>QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper::generateAppearance</function>
for generating appearance streams. See discussion in
<filename>QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper.hh</filename> for
limitations.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add two new helper functions for dealing with resource
dictionaries:
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getResourceNames()</function>
returns a list of all second-level keys, which correspond to
the names of resources, and
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::mergeResources()</function>
merges two resources dictionaries as long as they have
non-conflicting keys. These methods are useful for certain
types of objects that resolve resources from multiple places,
such as form fields.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add methods
<function>QPDFPageDocumentHelper::flattenAnnotations()</function>
and
<function>QPDFAnnotationObjectHelper::getPageContentForAppearance()</function>
for handling low-level details of annotation flattening.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new helper classes:
<classname>QPDFOutlineDocumentHelper</classname>,
<classname>QPDFOutlineObjectHelper</classname>,
<classname>QPDFPageLabelDocumentHelper</classname>,
<classname>QPDFNameTreeObjectHelper</classname>, and
<classname>QPDFNumberTreeObjectHelper</classname>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add method <function>QPDFObjectHandle::getJSON()</function>
that returns a JSON representation of the object. Call
<function>serialize()</function> on the result to convert it
to a string.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add a simple JSON serializer. This is not a complete or
general-purpose JSON library. It allows assembly and
serialization of JSON structures with some restrictions,
which are described in the header file. This is the
serializer used by qpdf's new JSON representation.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new <classname>QPDFObjectHandle::Matrix</classname>
class along with a few convenience methods for dealing with
six-element numerical arrays as matrices.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::wrapInArray</function>, which returns
the object itself if it is an array, or an array containing
the object otherwise. This is a common construct in PDF.
This method prevents you from having to explicitly test
whether something is a single element or an array.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Build Improvements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
It is no longer necessary to run
<command>autogen.sh</command> to build from a pristine
checkout. Automatically generated files are now committed so
that it is possible to build on platforms without autoconf
directly from a clean checkout of the repository. The
<command>configure</command> script detects if the files are
out of date when it also determines that the tools are
present to regenerate them.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Pull requests and the master branch are now built
automatically in <ulink
url="https://dev.azure.com/qpdf/qpdf/_build">Azure
Pipelines</ulink>, which is free for open source projects.
The build includes Linux, mac, Windows 32-bit and 64-bit
with mingw and MSVC, and an AppImage build. Official qpdf
releases are now built with Azure Pipelines.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Notes for Packagers
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
A new section has been added to the documentation with notes
for packagers. Please see <xref linkend="ref.packaging"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The qpdf detects out-of-date automatically generated files.
If your packaging system automatically refreshes libtool or
autoconf files, it could cause this check to fail. To avoid
this problem, pass
<option>--disable-check-autofiles</option> to
<command>configure</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
If you would like to have qpdf completion enabled
automatically, you can install completion files in the
distribution's default location. You can find sample
completion files to install in the
<filename>completions</filename> directory.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.2.1: August 18, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Command-line Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add
<option>--keep-files-open=<replaceable>[yn]</replaceable></option>
to override default determination of whether to keep files
open when merging. Please see the discussion of
<option>--keep-files-open</option> in <xref
linkend="ref.basic-options"/> for additional details.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.2.0: August 16, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Command-line Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <option>--no-warn</option> option to suppress issuing
warning messages. If there are any conditions that would
have caused warnings to be issued, the exit status is still
3.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes and Optimizations
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Performance fix: optimize page merging operation to avoid
unnecessary open/close calls on files being merged. This
solves a dramatic slow-down that was observed when merging
certain types of files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Optimize how memory was used for the TIFF predictor,
drastically improving performance and memory usage for files
containing high-resolution images compressed with Flate
using the TIFF predictor.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: end of line characters were not properly handled
inside strings in some cases.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: using <option>--progress</option> on very small
files could cause an infinite loop.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
API enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new class <classname>QPDFSystemError</classname>, derived
from <classname>std::runtime_error</classname>, which is now
thrown by <function>QUtil::throw_system_error</function>.
This enables the triggering <classname>errno</classname>
value to be retrieved.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <function>ClosedFileInputSource::stayOpen</function>
method, enabling a
<classname>ClosedFileInputSource</classname> to stay open
during manually indicated periods of high activity, thus
reducing the overhead of frequent open/close operations.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Build Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
For the mingw builds, change the name of the DLL import
library from <filename>libqpdf.a</filename> to
<filename>libqpdf.dll.a</filename> to more accurately
reflect that it is an import library rather than a static
library. This potentially clears the way for supporting a
static library in the future, though presently, the qpdf
Windows build only builds the DLL and executables.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.1.0: June 23, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Usability Improvements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
When splitting files, qpdf detects fonts and images that the
document metadata claims are referenced from a page but are
not actually referenced and omits them from the output file.
This change can cause a significant reduction in the size of
split PDF files for files created by some software packages.
In some cases, it can also make page splitting slower. Prior
versions of qpdf would believe the document metadata and
sometimes include all the images from all the other pages
even though the pages were no longer present. In the
unlikely event that the old behavior should be desired, or
if you have a case where page splitting is very slow, the
old behavior (and speed) can be enabled by specifying
<option>--preserve-unreferenced-resources</option>. For
additional details, please see <xref
linkend="ref.advanced-transformation"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When merging multiple PDF files, qpdf no longer leaves all
the files open. This makes it possible to merge numbers of
files that may exceed the operating system's limit for the
maximum number of open files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <option>--rotate</option> option's syntax has been
extended to make the page range optional. If you specify
<option>--rotate=<replaceable>angle</replaceable></option>
without specifying a page range, the rotation will be
applied to all pages. This can be especially useful for
adjusting a PDF created from a multi-page document that
was scanned upside down.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When merging multiple files, the <option>--verbose</option>
option now prints information about each file as it operates
on that file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When the <option>--progress</option> option is specified,
qpdf will print a running indicator of its best guess at how
far through the writing process it is. Note that, as with
all progress meters, it's an approximation. This option is
implemented in a way that makes it useful for software that
uses the qpdf library; see API Enhancements below.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Properly decrypt files that use revision 3 of the standard
security handler but use 40 bit keys (even though revision 3
supports 128-bit keys).
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Limit depth of nested data structures to prevent crashes
from certain types of malformed (malicious) PDFs.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
In &ldquo;newline before endstream&rdquo; mode, insert the
required extra newline before the
<literal>endstream</literal> at the end of object streams.
This one case was previously omitted.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
API Enhancements
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The first round of higher level &ldquo;helper&rdquo;
interfaces has been introduced. These are designed to
provide a more convenient way of interacting with certain
document features than using
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> directly. For
details on helpers, see <xref
linkend="ref.helper-classes"/>. Specific additional
interfaces are described below.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add two new document helper classes:
<classname>QPDFPageDocumentHelper</classname> for working
with pages, and
<classname>QPDFAcroFormDocumentHelper</classname> for
working with interactive forms. No old methods have been
removed, but <classname>QPDFPageDocumentHelper</classname>
is now the preferred way to perform operations on pages
rather than calling the old methods in
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> and
<classname>QPDF</classname> directly. Comments in the header
files direct you to the new interfaces. Please see the
header files and <filename>ChangeLog</filename> for
additional details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add three new object helper class:
<classname>QPDFPageObjectHelper</classname> for pages,
<classname>QPDFFormFieldObjectHelper</classname> for
interactive form fields, and
<classname>QPDFAnnotationObjectHelper</classname> for
annotations. All three classes are fairly sparse at the
moment, but they have some useful, basic functionality.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A new example program
<filename>examples/pdf-set-form-values.cc</filename> has
been added that illustrates use of the new document and
object helpers.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The method
<function>QPDFWriter::registerProgressReporter</function>
has been added. This method allows you to register a
function that is called by <classname>QPDFWriter</classname>
to update your idea of the percentage it thinks it is
through writing its output. Client programs can use this to
implement reasonably accurate progress meters. The
<command>qpdf</command> command line tool uses this to
implement its <option>--progress</option> option.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New methods
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::newUnicodeString</function> and
<function>QPDFObject::unparseBinary</function> have been
added to allow for more convenient creation of strings that
are explicitly encoded using big-endian UTF-16. This is
useful for creating strings that appear outside of content
streams, such as labels, form fields, outlines, document
metadata, etc.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A new class
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle::Rectangle</classname> has been
added to ease working with PDF rectangles, which are just
arrays of four numeric values.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.0.2: March 6, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
When a loop is detected while following cross reference
streams or tables, treat this as damage instead of silently
ignoring the previous table. This prevents loss of otherwise
recoverable data in some damaged files.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Properly handle pages with no contents.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.0.1: March 4, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Disregard data check errors when uncompressing
<literal>/FlateDecode</literal> streams. This is consistent
with most other PDF readers and allows qpdf to recover data
from another class of malformed PDF files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
On the command line when specifying page ranges, support
preceding a page number by &ldquo;r&rdquo; to indicate that it
should be counted from the end. For example, the range
<literal>r3-r1</literal> would indicate the last three pages
of a document.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>8.0.0: February 25, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Packaging and Distribution Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF is now distributed as an <ulink
url="https://appimage.org/">AppImage</ulink> in addition to
all the other ways it is distributed. The AppImage can be
found in the download area with the other packages. Thanks
to Kurt Pfeifle and Simon Peter for their contributions.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getUTF8Val</function> now
properly treats non-Unicode strings as encoded with PDF Doc
Encoding.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Improvements to handling of objects in PDF files that are
not of the expected type. In most cases, qpdf will be able
to warn for such cases rather than fail with an exception.
Previous versions of qpdf would sometimes fail with errors
such as &ldquo;operation for dictionary object attempted on
object of wrong type&rdquo;. This situation should be mostly
or entirely eliminated now.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhancements to the <command>qpdf</command> Command-line Tool.
All new options listed here are documented in more detail in
<xref linkend="ref.using"/>.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
The option
<option>--linearize-pass1=<replaceable>file</replaceable></option>
has been added for debugging qpdf's linearization code.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The option <option>--coalesce-contents</option> can be used
to combine content streams of a page whose contents are an
array of streams into a single stream.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
API Enhancements. All new API calls are documented in their
respective classes' header files. There are no non-compatible
changes to the API.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Add function <function>qpdf_check_pdf</function> to the C API.
This function does basic checking that is a subset of what
<command>qpdf --check</command> performs.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Major enhancements to the lexical layer of qpdf. For a
complete list of enhancements, please refer to the
<filename>ChangeLog</filename> file. Most of the changes
result in improvements to qpdf's ability handle erroneous
files. It is also possible for programs to handle
whitespace, comments, and inline images as tokens.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New API for working with PDF content streams at a lexical
level. The new class
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle::TokenFilter</classname> allows
the developer to provide token handlers. Token filters can be
used with several different methods in
<classname>QPDFObjectHandle</classname> as well as with a
lower-level interface. See comments in
<filename>QPDFObjectHandle.hh</filename> as well as the new
examples <filename>examples/pdf-filter-tokens.cc</filename>
and <filename>examples/pdf-count-strings.cc</filename> for
details.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>7.1.1: February 4, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: files whose /ID fields were other than 16 bytes long
can now be properly linearized
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A few compile and link issues have been corrected for some
platforms.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>7.1.0: January 14, 2018</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
PDF files contain streams that may be compressed with various
compression algorithms which, in some cases, may be enhanced
by various predictor functions. Previously only the PNG up
predictor was supported. In this version, all the PNG
predictors as well as the TIFF predictor are supported. This
increases the range of files that qpdf is able to handle.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF now allows a raw encryption key to be specified in place
of a password when opening encrypted files, and will
optionally display the encryption key used by a file. This is
a non-standard operation, but it can be useful in certain
situations. Please see the discussion of
<option>--password-is-hex-key</option> in <xref
linkend="ref.basic-options"/> or the comments around
<function>QPDF::setPasswordIsHexKey</function> in
<filename>QPDF.hh</filename> for additional details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: numbers ending with a trailing decimal point are now
properly recognized as numbers.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: when building qpdf from source on some platforms
(especially MacOS), the build could get confused by older
versions of qpdf installed on the system. This has been
corrected.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>7.0.0: September 15, 2017</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Packaging and Distribution Changes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF's primary license is now <ulink
url="http://www.apache.org/licenses/LICENSE-2.0">version 2.0
of the Apache License</ulink> rather than version 2.0 of the
Artistic License. You may still, at your option, consider
qpdf to be licensed with version 2.0 of the Artistic
license.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF no longer has a dependency on the PCRE (Perl-Compatible
Regular Expression) library. QPDF now has an added
dependency on the JPEG library.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug Fixes
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
This release contains many bug fixes for various infinite
loops, memory leaks, and other memory errors that could be
encountered with specially crafted or otherwise erroneous
PDF files.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
New Features
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF now supports reading and writing streams encoded with
JPEG or RunLength encoding. Library API enhancements and
command-line options have been added to control this
behavior. See command-line options
<option>--compress-streams</option> and
<option>--decode-level</option> and methods
<function>QPDFWriter::setCompressStreams</function> and
<function>QPDFWriter::setDecodeLevel</function>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
QPDF is much better at recovering from broken files. In most
cases, qpdf will skip invalid objects and will preserve
broken stream data by not attempting to filter broken
streams. QPDF is now able to recover or at least not crash
on dozens of broken test files I have received over the past
few years.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Page rotation is now supported and accessible from both the
library and the command line.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> supports writing files in
a way that preserves PCLm compliance in support of
driverless printing. This is very specialized and is only
useful to applications that already know how to create PCLm
files.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Enhancements to the <command>qpdf</command> Command-line Tool.
All new options listed here are documented in more detail in
<xref linkend="ref.using"/>.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Command-line arguments can now be read from files or
standard input using <literal>@file</literal> or
<literal>@-</literal> syntax. Please see <xref
linkend="ref.invocation"/>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--rotate</option>: request page rotation
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--newline-before-endstream</option>: ensure that a
newline appears before every <literal>endstream</literal>
keyword in the file; used to prevent qpdf from breaking
PDF/A compliance on already compliant files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--preserve-unreferenced</option>: preserve
unreferenced objects in the input PDF
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--split-pages</option>: break output into chunks
with fixed numbers of pages
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--verbose</option>: print the name of each output
file that is created
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<option>--compress-streams</option> and
<option>--decode-level</option> replace
<option>--stream-data</option> for improving granularity of
controlling compression and decompression of stream data.
The <option>--stream-data</option> option will remain
available.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When running <command>qpdf --check</command> with other
options, checks are always run first. This enables qpdf to
perform its full recovery logic before outputting other
information. This can be especially useful when manually
recovering broken files, looking at qpdf's regenerated cross
reference table, or other similar operations.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Process <command>--pages</command> earlier so that other
options like <option>--show-pages</option> or
<option>--split-pages</option> can operate on the file after
page splitting/merging has occurred.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
API Changes. All new API calls are documented in their
respective classes' header files.
</para>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::rotatePage</function>: apply
rotation to a page object
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFWriter::setNewlineBeforeEndstream</function>:
force newline to appear before <literal>endstream</literal>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFWriter::setPreserveUnreferencedObjects</function>:
preserve unreferenced objects that appear in the input PDF.
The default behavior is to discard them.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New <classname>Pipeline</classname> types
<classname>Pl_RunLength</classname> and
<classname>Pl_DCT</classname> are available for developers
who wish to produce or consume RunLength or DCT stream data
directly. The <filename>examples/pdf-create.cc</filename>
example illustrates their use.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFWriter::setCompressStreams</function> and
<function>QPDFWriter::setDecodeLevel</function> methods
control handling of different types of stream compression.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new C API functions
<function>qpdf_set_compress_streams</function>,
<function>qpdf_set_decode_level</function>,
<function>qpdf_set_preserve_unreferenced_objects</function>,
and <function>qpdf_set_newline_before_endstream</function>
corresponding to the new <classname>QPDFWriter</classname>
methods.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>6.0.0: November 10, 2015</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Implement <option>--deterministic-id</option> command-line
option and <function>QPDFWriter::setDeterministicID</function>
as well as C API function
<function>qpdf_set_deterministic_ID</function> for generating
a deterministic ID for non-encrypted files. When this option
is selected, the ID of the file depends on the contents of the
output file, and not on transient items such as the timestamp
or output file name.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Make qpdf more tolerant of files whose xref table entries are
not the correct length.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>5.1.3: May 24, 2015</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: fix-qdf was not properly handling files that
contained object streams with more than 255 objects in them.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: qpdf was not properly initializing Microsoft's secure
crypto provider on fresh Windows installations that had not
had any keys created yet.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix a few errors found by Gynvael Coldwind and
Mateusz Jurczyk of the Google Security Team. Please see the
ChangeLog for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Properly handle pages that have no contents at all. There were
many cases in which qpdf handled this fine, but a few methods
blindly obtained page contents with handling the possibility
that there were no contents.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Make qpdf more robust for a few more kinds of problems that
may occur in invalid PDF files.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>5.1.2: June 7, 2014</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: linearizing files could create a corrupted output
file under extremely unlikely file size circumstances. See
ChangeLog for details. The odds of getting hit by this are
very low, though one person did.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: qpdf would fail to write files that had streams with
decode parameters referencing other streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New example program: <command>pdf-split-pages</command>:
efficiently split PDF files into individual pages. The example
program does this more efficiently than using <command>qpdf
--pages</command> to do it.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Packaging fix: Visual C++ binaries did not support Windows XP.
This has been rectified by updating the compilers used to
generate the release binaries.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>5.1.1: January 14, 2014</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Performance fix: copying foreign objects could be very slow
with certain types of files. This was most likely to be
visible during page splitting and was due to traversing the
same objects multiple times in some cases.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>5.1.0: December 17, 2013</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Added runtime option
(<function>QUtil::setRandomDataProvider</function>) to supply
your own random data provider. You can use this if you want
to avoid using the OS-provided secure random number generation
facility or stdlib's less secure version. See comments in
include/qpdf/QUtil.hh for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fixed image comparison tests to not create 12-bit-per-pixel
images since some versions of tiffcmp have bugs in comparing
them in some cases. This increases the disk space required by
the image comparison tests, which are off by default anyway.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Introduce a number of small fixes for compilation on the
latest clang in MacOS and the latest Visual C++ in Windows.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Be able to handle broken files that end the xref table header
with a space instead of a newline.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>5.0.1: October 18, 2013</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Thanks to a detailed review by Florian Weimer and the Red Hat
Product Security Team, this release includes a number of
non-user-visible security hardening changes. Please see the
ChangeLog file in the source distribution for the complete
list.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
When available, operating system-specific secure random number
generation is used for generating initialization vectors and
other random values used during encryption or file creation.
For the Windows build, this results in an added dependency on
Microsoft's cryptography API. To disable the OS-specific
cryptography and use the old version, pass the
<option>--enable-insecure-random</option> option to
<command>./configure</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The <command>qpdf</command> command-line tool now issues a
warning when <option>-accessibility=n</option> is specified
for newer encryption versions stating that the option is
ignored. qpdf, per the spec, has always ignored this flag,
but it previously did so silently. This warning is issued
only by the command-line tool, not by the library. The
library's handling of this flag is unchanged.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>5.0.0: July 10, 2013</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Bug fix: previous versions of qpdf would lose objects with
generation != 0 when generating object streams. Fixing this
required changes to the public API.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Removed methods from public API that were only supposed to be
called by QPDFWriter and couldn't realistically be called
anywhere else. See ChangeLog for details.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
New <type>QPDFObjGen</type> class added to represent an object
ID/generation pair.
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getObjGen()</function> is now
preferred over
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getObjectID()</function> and
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getGeneration()</function> as it
makes it less likely for people to accidentally write code
that ignores the generation number. See
<filename>QPDF.hh</filename> and
<filename>QPDFObjectHandle.hh</filename> for additional notes.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add <option>--show-npages</option> command-line option to the
<command>qpdf</command> command to show the number of pages in
a file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Allow omission of the page range within
<option>--pages</option> for the <command>qpdf</command>
command. When omitted, the page range is implicitly taken to
be all the pages in the file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Various enhancements were made to support different types of
broken files or broken readers. Details can be found in
<filename>ChangeLog</filename>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>4.1.0: April 14, 2013</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Note to people including qpdf in distributions: the
<filename>.la</filename> files generated by libtool are now
installed by qpdf's <command>make install</command> target.
Before, they were not installed. This means that if your
distribution does not want to include <filename>.la</filename>
files, you must remove them as part of your packaging process.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Major enhancement: API enhancements have been made to support
parsing of content streams. This enhancement includes the
following changes:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::parseContentStream</function>
method parses objects in a content stream and calls
handlers in a callback class. The example
<filename>examples/pdf-parse-content.cc</filename>
illustrates how this may be used.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<type>QPDFObjectHandle</type> can now represent operators
and inline images, object types that may only appear in
content streams.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Method <function>QPDFObjectHandle::getTypeCode()</function>
returns an enumerated type value representing the
underlying object type. Method
<function>QPDFObjectHandle::getTypeName()</function>
returns a text string describing the name of the type of a
<type>QPDFObjectHandle</type> object. These methods can be
used for more efficient parsing and debugging/diagnostic
messages.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
<command>qpdf --check</command> now parses all pages' content
streams in addition to doing other checks. While there are
still many types of errors that cannot be detected, syntactic
errors in content streams will now be reported.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Minor compilation enhancements have been made to facilitate
easier for support for a broader range of compilers and
compiler versions.
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Warning flags have been moved into a separate variable in
<filename>autoconf.mk</filename>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The configure flag <option>--enable-werror</option> work
for Microsoft compilers
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
All MSVC CRT security warnings have been resolved.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
All C-style casts in C++ Code have been replaced by C++
casts, and many casts that had been included to suppress
higher warning levels for some compilers have been removed,
primarily for clarity. Places where integer type coercion
occurs have been scrutinized. A new casting policy has
been documented in the manual. This is of concern mainly
to people porting qpdf to new platforms or compilers. It
is not visible to programmers writing code that uses the
library
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Some internal limits have been removed in code that
converts numbers to strings. This is largely invisible to
users, but it does trigger a bug in some older versions of
mingw-w64's C++ library. See
<filename>README-windows.md</filename> in the source
distribution if you think this may affect you. The copy of
the DLL distributed with qpdf's binary distribution is not
affected by this problem.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The RPM spec file previously included with qpdf has been
removed. This is because virtually all Linux distributions
include qpdf now that it is a dependency of CUPS filters.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
A few bug fixes are included:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Overridden compressed objects are properly handled.
Before, there were certain constructs that could cause qpdf
to see old versions of some objects. The most usual
manifestation of this was loss of filled in form values for
certain files.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Installation no longer uses GNU/Linux-specific versions of
some commands, so <command>make install</command> works on
Solaris with native tools.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
The 64-bit mingw Windows binary package no longer includes
a 32-bit DLL.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>4.0.1: January 17, 2013</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix detection of binary attachments in test suite to avoid
false test failures on some platforms.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add clarifying comment in <filename>QPDF.hh</filename> to
methods that return the user password explaining that it is no
longer possible with newer encryption formats to recover the
user password knowing the owner password. In earlier
encryption formats, the user password was encrypted in the
file using the owner password. In newer encryption formats, a
separate encryption key is used on the file, and that key is
independently encrypted using both the user password and the
owner password.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<varlistentry>
<term>4.0.0: December 31, 2012</term>
<listitem>
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Major enhancement: support has been added for newer encryption
schemes supported by version X of Adobe Acrobat. This
includes use of 127-character passwords, 256-bit encryption
keys, and the encryption scheme specified in ISO 32000-2, the
PDF 2.0 specification. This scheme can be chosen from the
command line by specifying use of 256-bit keys. qpdf also
supports the deprecated encryption method used by Acrobat IX.
This encryption style has known security weaknesses and should
not be used in practice. However, such files exist &ldquo;in
the wild,&rdquo; so support for this scheme is still useful.
New methods
<function>QPDFWriter::setR6EncryptionParameters</function>
(for the PDF 2.0 scheme) and
<function>QPDFWriter::setR5EncryptionParameters</function>
(for the deprecated scheme) have been added to enable these
new encryption schemes. Corresponding functions have been
added to the C API as well.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Full support for Adobe extension levels in PDF version
information. Starting with PDF version 1.7, corresponding to
ISO 32000, Adobe adds new functionality by increasing the
extension level rather than increasing the version. This
support includes addition of the
<function>QPDF::getExtensionLevel</function> method for
retrieving the document's extension level, addition of
versions of
<function>QPDFWriter::setMinimumPDFVersion</function> and
<function>QPDFWriter::forcePDFVersion</function> that accept
an extension level, and extended syntax for specifying forced
and minimum versions on the command line as described in <xref
linkend="ref.advanced-transformation"/>. Corresponding
functions have been added to the C API as well.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Minor fixes to prevent qpdf from referencing objects in the
file that are not referenced in the file's overall structure.
Most files don't have any such objects, but some files have
contain unreferenced objects with errors, so these fixes
prevent qpdf from needlessly rejecting or complaining about
such objects.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new generalized methods for reading and writing files
from/to programmer-defined sources. The method
<function>QPDF::processInputSource</function> allows the
programmer to use any input source for the input file, and
<function>QPDFWriter::setOutputPipeline</function> allows the
programmer to write the output file through any pipeline.
These methods would make it possible to perform any number of
specialized operations, such as accessing external storage
systems, creating bindings for qpdf in other programming
languages that have their own I/O systems, etc.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Add new method <function>QPDF::getEncryptionKey</function> for
retrieving the underlying encryption key used in the file.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
This release includes a small handful of non-compatible API
changes. While effort is made to avoid such changes, all the
non-compatible API changes in this version were to parts of
the API that would likely never be used outside the library
itself. In all cases, the altered methods or structures were
parts of the <classname>QPDF</classname> that were public to
enable them to be called from either
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> or were part of validation
code that was over-zealous in reporting problems in parts of
the file that would not ordinarily be referenced. In no case
did any of the removed methods do anything worse that falsely
report error conditions in files that were broken in ways that
didn't matter. The following public parts of the
<classname>QPDF</classname> class were changed in a
non-compatible way:
<itemizedlist>
<listitem>
<para>
Updated nested <classname>QPDF::EncryptionData</classname>
class to add fields needed by the newer encryption formats,
member variables changed to private so that future changes
will not require breaking backward compatibility.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Added additional parameters to
<function>compute_data_key</function>, which is used by
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname> to compute the encryption
key used to encrypt a specific object.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Removed the method
<function>flattenScalarReferences</function>. This method
was previously used prior to writing a new PDF file, but it
has the undesired side effect of causing qpdf to read
objects in the file that were not referenced. Some
otherwise files have unreferenced objects with errors in
them, so this could cause qpdf to reject files that would
be accepted by virtually all other PDF readers. In fact,
qpdf relied on only a very small part of what
flattenScalarReferences did, so only this part has been
preserved, and it is now done directly inside
<classname>QPDFWriter</classname>.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Removed the method <function>decodeStreams</function>.
This method was used by the <option>--check</option> option
of the <command>qpdf</command> command-line tool to force
all streams in the file to be decoded, but it also suffered
from the problem of opening otherwise unreferenced streams
and thus could report false positive. The
<option>--check</option> option now causes qpdf to go
through all the motions of writing a new file based on the
original one, so it will always reference and check exactly
those parts of a file that any ordinary viewer would check.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Removed the method
<function>trimTrailerForWrite</function>. This method was
used by <classname>QPDFWriter</classname> to modify the
original QPDF object by removing fields from the trailer
dictionary that wouldn't apply to the newly written file.
This functionality, though generally harmless, was a poor
implementation and has been replaced by having QPDFWriter
filter these out when copying the trailer rather than
modifying the original QPDF object. (Note that qpdf never
modifies the original file itself.)
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Allow the PDF header to appear anywhere in the first 1024
bytes of the file. This is consistent with what other readers
do.
</para>
</listitem>
<listitem>
<para>
Fix the <command>pkg-config</command> files to list zlib and
pcre in <function>Requires.private</function> to better
support static linking using <command>pkg-config</command>.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<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>
<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&nbsp;2.0.
</para>
</listitem>
</itemizedlist>
</listitem>
</varlistentry>
<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&lt;Buffer&gt;</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.md</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.md</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>
<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>
<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 --> Gajic (<ulink
url="http://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/">http://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/</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>
Žarko Gajic has written a Delphi wrapper for qpdf, which can
be downloaded from qpdf's download side. Žarko's Delphi
wrapper is released with the same licensing terms as qpdf
itself and comes with this disclaimer: &ldquo;Delphi wrapper
unit <filename>qpdf.pas</filename> created by Žarko Gajic
(<ulink
url="http://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/">http://zarko-gajic.iz.hr/</ulink>).
Use at your own risk and for whatever purpose you want. No
support is provided. Sample code is provided.&rdquo;
</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
&ldquo;early code change&rdquo; 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>&lt;stdexcept&gt;</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>
<appendix id="ref.upgrading-to-4.0">
<title>Upgrading to 4.0</title>
<para>
While version 4.0 includes a few non-compatible API changes, it is
very unlikely that anyone's code would have used any of those parts
of the API since they generally required information that would
only be available inside the library. In the unlikely event that
you should run into trouble, please see the ChangeLog. See also
<xref linkend="ref.release-notes"/> for a complete list of the
non-compatible API changes made in this version.
</para>
</appendix>
</book>
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