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Adobe Acrobat SDK
Introduction
Developing Plug-ins and Applications
About the Acrobat core API 17
About the Acrobat core API
The Acrobat core API consists of methods that operate on objects located within PDF documents. The
Acrobat core API is implemented as a standard ANSI C programming library where methods are C
functions and objects are opaque data types that encapsulate their data. The Acrobat core API is
supported on Windows (32 bit), Mac OS, Linux®, and some UNIX® platforms like Solaris™, HP-UX, and AIX®.
The following diagram illustrates the hierarchy of the Acrobat core API.
Acrobat Viewer layer
The Acrobat Viewer (AV) layer enables plug-ins to control Acrobat and modify its user interface. Using AV
methods, you can, for example, add menus and menu commands, add buttons to toolbars, open and close
files, display simple dialog boxes, and perform many other application-level tasks.
Note:
AV layer methods are not available through the PDF Library API.
Portable Document layer
The Portable Document (PD) layer provides access to PDF document components such as pages and
annotations. Closely related to the PD layer are two method groups, each of which controls a different
aspect of a PDF document:
●
PDFEdit methods deal with the physical representation of a PDF document. More specifically, PDFEdit
methods handle page content as a list of objects whose values and attributes are modifiable. These
methods allow your plug-in or PDF Library application to read, write, edit, and create page contents
and page resources, which may contain fonts, images, and so on.
●
PDSEdit methods deal with the logical structure of a PDF document. A PDF document’s logical
structure is built independently of its physical representation, with pointers from the logical structure
to the physical representation, and the reverse. PDSEdit methods store the logical structure
information. They enable your plug-in or PDF Library application to access PDF files by means of a
structure tree. Having logical structure in PDF files facilitates navigating, searching, and extracting data
from PDF documents. For example, PDSEdit methods can obtain logically-ordered content,
independently of the drawing order.
PDFEdit
PDSEdit
COS layer
Acrobat Viewer
Portable Document
layer
layer
Acrobat
Support
layer