New PDF Features for Acrobat 9

PDFlib supports various PDF features according to Acrobat 9 (technically: PDF 1.7 Adobe extension level 3):

External graphical content. Pages in PDF documents can contain references to pages in another PDF file, so-called Reference XObjects. The original file contains only a placeholder, e.g. a low-resolution version of an image or simply a note which mentions that the actual page contents are missing. Using this technique repeated content (e.g. for transactional printing) does not have to be transferred again and again. Reference XObjects are a crucial component of PDF/X-5g and PDF/X-5pg.

Layer variants. Layer variants (also called layer configurations) can be considered groups of layers. The grouping makes layers safe for production because the user can no longer inadvertently activate or deactivate the wrong set of layers (e.g. enable a particular language layer but forget to activate the image layer which is common to all languages). For this reason layer variants are the basis for using layers in the PDF/X-4 and PDF/X-5 standards.

PDF Portfolios. PDF Portfolios group PDF and other documents in a single entity which can conveniently be used with Acrobat 9. If no hierarchical folders are used for organizing the file attachments, the resulting PDF collections can be used with Acrobat 8 as well. PDFlib also supports predefined and custom metadata fields to facilitate the organization of file attachments within a PDF Portfolio. New actions can be used to create bookmarks which directly jump to a page in an embedded document.

Georeferenced PDF. GeoPDF contains geographic reference information for the whole page or individual maps on the page. Acrobat 9 offers various features for interacting with GeoPDF. PDFlib can be used to assign geospatial reference data to images and partial or full pages.

AES-256 encryption and Unicode passwords. PDFlib supports AES-256 encryption for improved security. AES-256 encryption has been introduced with Acrobat 9 and also allows Unicode passwords.

Import Acrobat 9 documents. PDFlib+PDI and PPS can import and process Acrobat 9 documents. The pCOS interface can also analyze Acrobat 9 documents.