In August 2023 the PDF Association launched its first set of 4 free cheat sheets, comprising 9 pages of condensed technical information about PDF. Designed for rapid access to key facts, these cheat sheets have become popular across a wide range of stakeholders.

Today we are launching the second edition of this collection, growing to 18 pages across 9 cheat sheets. Changes include corrections to the original cheat sheets, some minor improvements and 5 new cheat sheets focusing on logical structure, tagged PDF, and the Arlington PDF model.

The new cheat sheets summarize the following:

• PDF 1.7 and PDF 2.0 standard structure elements
• Key differences between PDF 1.7 and PDF 2.0 standard structure elements
• Structure attributes
• Standard structure attribute owners
• The structure tree root and structure element dictionaries
• Marked Content
• Semantic representation of math, and
• The Arlington PDF Model

Based on feedback received we’ve improved the tagging to support those using assistive technologies. Version 2 of all cheat sheets now includes detailed logical structure and tagging, offering improved navigation and readability for those using the cheat sheets electronically!

With this release, we are adding the option of a PDF collection containing all the version 2 cheat sheets as embedded files. One download (or bookmark) conveniently gets them all. As of the release date support for PDF collections is varied, so different software may produce differing results.

The PDF Association thanks its members across several Technical Working Groups who provided valuable input and feedback.

In addition to the cheat sheets themselves, the work of distilling parts of PDF specifications for this purpose also resulted in several errata being reported in our GitHub pdf-issues repository against ISO 32000-2:2020 (the core PDF 2.0 specification) and other publications.

Download all cheat sheets in a PDF collection today!

PDF Basics

Get the PDF Basics cheat sheet

PDF Graphic Operators and Operands

Get the Graphic Operators and Operands cheat sheet.

PDF Common Objects

Get the Common Objects cheat sheet.

PDF Color

Get the color cheat sheet.

PDF's logical structure

Get the logical structure cheat sheet.

PDF's standard structure elements

Get the standard structure elements cheat sheet.

PDF's structure attributes

Get the structure attributes cheat sheet.

MathML in PDF

Get the Math cheat sheet.

Arlington PDF Model

Get the Arlington PDF Model cheat sheet.

Conclusion

Together, these cheat sheets will provide a useful resource for developers who jump in and out of PDF technology.

We hope that PDF’s technical community will find these sheets a useful resource, in addition to helping to introduce new developers to PDF and helping those struggling with reading PDF’s specification documents.

If you have ideas for the need for additional PDF cheat sheets, such as to address common mistakes or misunderstandings, please email us at info@pdfa.org.