Authoring PDF files by hand?

Question

I'd like to make a PDF file comprised entirely of a folder of images, preferably with no added compression or cruft. Are there any programs that would let me author the PDF file manually via script or API? The important thing is that a) my JPEGs don't get compressed a second time, and b) they're displayed at their native resolution, with no borders. (In other words, I'd like my PDF file to have nothing more than the straight JPG image data centered at 0,0 on each page, sized correctly.) As far as I can tell, most authoring programs recompress the images and add their own layout stuff.

Answer 1

You say "by hand" which confused some people, I think. You're not actually saying that you want to write raw PDF, right? Below is code that uses the open source iTextSharp library (5.1.1.0). Set the variable FolderWithImages to your folder containing images and PdfFileName to the PDF that you want to kick out and it will take all JPGs in the folder and create a PDF. This code is very simple but you can do a lot of things like resizing, scaling, etc. There's tons of code out there for iTextSharp and its parent project iText.

using System;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.IO;
using System.Windows.Forms;
using iTextSharp.text;
using iTextSharp.text.pdf;

namespace WindowsFormsApplication2
{
    public partial class Form1 : Form
    {
        public Form1()
        {
            InitializeComponent();
        }

        private void Form1_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
        {
            //The folder containing our images
            string FolderWithImages = Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Desktop);
            //The PDF that we will output
            string PdfFileName = Path.Combine(Environment.GetFolderPath(Environment.SpecialFolder.Desktop), "ImagesCombined.pdf");

            //Create a basic stream to write to
            using (FileStream fs = new FileStream(PdfFileName, FileMode.Create, FileAccess.Write, FileShare.None))
            {
                //Create a new PDF document
                using (Document doc = new Document())
                {
                    //Bind a the document to the stream
                    using (PdfWriter w = PdfWriter.GetInstance(doc, fs))
                    {
                        //Open our document for writing
                        doc.Open();

                        //Will hold an instance of our image
                        iTextSharp.text.Image img;

                        //Grab all JPGs from the given folder and loop through them
                        string[] Images = Directory.GetFiles(FolderWithImages, "*.jpg", SearchOption.TopDirectoryOnly);
                        foreach (string i in Images)
                        {
                            //Get the JPG as an iTextSharp "image"
                            img = iTextSharp.text.Image.GetInstance(i);

                            //Tell the image that when placed we want it at (0,0)
                            img.SetAbsolutePosition(0, 0);

                            //Tell the system that the next "page" that we add should be the dimension of the image
                            doc.SetPageSize(new iTextSharp.text.Rectangle(0, 0, img.Width, img.Height));

                            //Add a new blank page
                            doc.NewPage();

                            //Put the image on the blank page
                            doc.Add(img);
                        }

                        //Close our output PDF
                        doc.Close();
                    }
                }
            }
            this.Close();
        }
    }
}

Answer 2

Creating PDF files by hand is not recommend for the faint hearted! If you really want to try it, we wrote a series on creating PDF files by hand on our blog http://www.jpedal.org/PDFblog/?s=%22Make+your+own+PDF+file%22