The ReportLab APIs mirror the PDF file structure relatively closely.
Don't listen to the people who are nattering on about how PDF is proprietary on purpose. I think that may have been the case in its early years but it hasn't been the case this millennium.
PDF 1.7 (the spec from 02008) and even earlier verions are most often used, as you'll see if you run head -1 *.pdf in a directory with a lot of random PDFs. PDF 2.0 is not important and you may want to intentionally write an earlier version for broader compatibility. The big incompatibility is actually PDF 1.5 to 1.6: 1.6 added compressed object streams, and a lot of readers still don't support those.
Hello. Thank you for the suggestions. I will look into ReportLab and the older versions of PDF. I am trying to avoid the whole PostScript / GhostScript route since my primary goal is to generate a PDF as fast as possible.
Usually what's slow is the layout computation, not the PDF text serialization of it, which is pretty efficient. Though I found that ReportLab was adding lots of metadata to all my links, resulting in an overall large filesize, and because it targets a pre-1.6 version the links were all uncompressed (though the page contents were compressed, which has been a feature of PDF for a long time).
The ReportLab APIs mirror the PDF file structure relatively closely.
Don't listen to the people who are nattering on about how PDF is proprietary on purpose. I think that may have been the case in its early years but it hasn't been the case this millennium.
PDF 1.7 (the spec from 02008) and even earlier verions are most often used, as you'll see if you run head -1 *.pdf in a directory with a lot of random PDFs. PDF 2.0 is not important and you may want to intentionally write an earlier version for broader compatibility. The big incompatibility is actually PDF 1.5 to 1.6: 1.6 added compressed object streams, and a lot of readers still don't support those.
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¹ https://github.com/kragen/dercuano/blob/master/genpdf.py
² http://canonical.org/~kragen/sw/laserboot/Makefile