Top all-time · #11068
Java PDF Blog
Company blog · blog.idrsolutions.comprogrammingweb
Java PDF Blog is the company blog at blog.idrsolutions.com, writing about programming and web. Since 2012, 7 different Hacker News readers have linked it 8 times. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-10-22, and you can follow it by feed.
Too few sampled comments (5) to say how often HN recommends it.?
Why HN links it
HN readers link this PDF and font blog for technical background: linearised PDF files, and TrueType hinting needed for some CJK fonts. Comments cite its posts as references rather than judging the writing.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 5 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
This blog is written by the developers at IDRsolutions about all things related to PDF, Java, HTML5, SVG and other tech related topics. It includes tutorials on the PDF format, interesting links, things we discover, moans about Java or PDF and things we find out in the course of developing and maint
What Hacker News says?
Linearised PDF files are defined in order and can be read from the start. https://blog.idrsolutions.com/2010/02/linearized-pdf-files/
Comment linking /2010/02/linearized-pdf-files/
on “Hosting SQLite databases on GitHub Pages or any static file hoster”Submitted Things I learned at JavaOne 2012 as a story · 22 points
HN discussionWhere did I say PDFs have to be in text format? I said every PDF has an equivalent text-only representation. The format, like postscript and eps started as text-only. Compression, making the files binary was added as an afterthought, to make files smaller (much smaller). If it were binary from the start, its designers would not have made the table of contents at the end waste bytes by writing offsets in ascii. See h…
Comment linking /?s=%22Make+your+own+PDF+file
on “Embedded PDF viewer in Firefox 81 supports filling forms”Submitted What is it really like to visit Silicon valley? as a story · 11 points
HN discussionWatch out because some CJK fonts from Microsoft require hinting to render correctly. They are made up of composite glyphs where each sub-glyph corresponds to a brush stroke and hinting is used to scale and position them. More details here: https://blog.idrsolutions.com/2011/10/truetype-hinting-big-s...
Comment linking /2011/10/truetype-hinting-big-screens-for-small-details/
on “Pathfinder, a fast GPU-based font rasterizer in Rust”Submitted Open? from O'Reilly - would you like a new version of Java in a Nutshell? as a story · 2 points
HN discussionDo you mean the old Java crap, like https://netbeans.org/images_www/screenshots/platform/jmonkey... https://netbeans.org/images_www/screenshots/platform/nbAWSAd... https://netbeans.org/images_www/screenshots/platform/lg_soft... https://netbeans.org/images_www/screenshots/platform/GGSSEph... https://netbeans.org/images_www/screenshots/platform/platypu... https://netbeans.org/images_www/screenshots/platform/blueMar...…
Comment linking /wp-content/uploads/2014/03/viewer_drop_down.png
on “Go fonts”Make use of TeX and Friends source code for handling PDF symbols, then it is much easier to check different implementations. For example, TikZ/PGF package has both PS and PDF implementations of the same graphical objects. So you can see how PDF literals or PS specials come into object stream. Also it is really not that cryptic but very much laborious, hence many people rely on classical tools to generate PDF instead…
Comment linking /2010/09/grow-your-own-pdf-file-part-1-pdf-objects-and-data-types/
on “Ask HN: Why is the PDF format so inaccessible?”
