These docs describe changes that aren’t released yet. For the newest release, see the released docs.
Glossary
The terms the docs use, in plain words. Each page links a term here the first time it uses one.
How Lamina PDF works
Section titled “How Lamina PDF works”Overlay
Section titled “Overlay”Where Lamina PDF keeps your edits. The bytes you opened never change; the overlay sits on top of them, and saving writes it out. See how Lamina PDF thinks about a PDF.
Incremental save
Section titled “Incremental save”A save that keeps the original bytes as they are and appends a new revision with your edits after them. Signatures over the original stay valid.
Full rewrite
Section titled “Full rewrite”A save that writes the whole file again. The result is smaller and tidier, but it’s no longer the original bytes, so it breaks any signature.
Façade
Section titled “Façade”The laminapdf crate: one API in front of Lamina PDF’s core crates, which most Rust code depends on alone.
The JavaScript that sits next to each .wasm file. It loads the module and converts values between JavaScript and Rust.
Export condition
Section titled “Export condition”A key in a package’s exports map, such as node, browser, deno or workerd, that tells a runtime or bundler which file to load. @laminapdf/sdk has one per runtime.
Inside a PDF file
Section titled “Inside a PDF file”PDF’s object layer: the dictionaries, arrays, numbers, strings, names, streams and references a file is made of.
Content stream
Section titled “Content stream”A stream of drawing instructions for a page: where to put text, which lines and shapes to draw, which images to place.
XObject
Section titled “XObject”A reusable piece of content that a content stream draws by name: an image, or a form, which is a group of drawing instructions.
Cross-reference table
Section titled “Cross-reference table”The index at the end of a file that gives the byte offset of every object, so a reader can jump straight to one. Newer files store it as a compressed stream instead.
Short for cross-reference table.
Object stream
Section titled “Object stream”A compressed stream that holds many small objects together, to make the file smaller. Files from PDF 1.5 on can use them.
Page space
Section titled “Page space”Lamina PDF’s coordinates: points from the top-left corner of the page as it’s displayed, with y going down. See pages and coordinates.
Crop box
Section titled “Crop box”The part of a page a viewer shows; anything outside it is cut off. Page space starts at its top-left corner.
User unit
Section titled “User unit”A page entry that makes each user-space unit bigger than 1/72 of an inch, for very large pages. Lamina PDF applies it, so page-space numbers are always points of 1/72 inch.
User space
Section titled “User space”PDF’s own coordinates: points from the bottom-left corner of the page, with y going up, before any rotation. Lamina PDF’s API uses page space instead; see pages and coordinates.
Fonts and text
Section titled “Fonts and text”Standard 14 fonts
Section titled “Standard 14 fonts”The fourteen fonts every PDF reader supplies: Times, Helvetica and Courier, each in four styles, plus Symbol and ZapfDingbats. A PDF can use them without embedding them.
Type 0
Section titled “Type 0”A font type whose character codes can be more than one byte long, so a font can reach any of its glyphs. Lamina PDF embeds every font except the standard 14 as Type 0.
A table that maps a font’s character codes to character IDs (CIDs), which pick its glyphs, or, in a ToUnicode CMap, to Unicode text.
ToUnicode
Section titled “ToUnicode”A CMap a font carries that maps its codes to Unicode, so a reader can copy, search and extract the text.
Signatures
Section titled “Signatures”DocMDP
Section titled “DocMDP”The permissions of a certifying signature: which changes the signed document still allows, such as none, filling in forms, or comments. DocMDP stands for document modification detection and prevention.
A usage-rights signature, which unlocks features such as saving form data in Adobe Reader. An edit it doesn’t allow invalidates it.