What is a .pdf file?
application/pdf
PDF (Portable Document Format) is a page-oriented format that fixes layout, fonts, and vector and raster graphics so a page renders identically anywhere. A `%PDF-` header is followed by numbered objects, a cross-reference table mapping each to a byte offset, and a trailer; edits append incremental updates rather than rewrite the file. Page content is a stream of drawing operators, so a PDF holds no words or paragraphs, only positioned glyph runs. Adobe released it in 1993 and gave it to ISO as ISO 32000-1 in 2008.
How to use a .pdf file
Use an example PDF to test text extraction, rendering, metadata parsing, AcroForm handling, and OCR pipelines — checking that extraction reconstructs reading order from glyph positions, that a scanned page yields no text, and that an incremental update leaves earlier revisions in the file.
Download example .pdf files
- Simple 1-Page PDFA single-page PDF with a title and body text — the simplest valid document for testing PDF viewers, parsers, and text extraction. Paired with an image-only scanned twin for OCR testing.
- 10-Page PDF with Bookmarked TOCA ten-page PDF with a table of contents and a full bookmark outline (10 entries) — for testing PDF navigation, outline parsing, and page extraction.
- Fillable Form (AcroForm)A one-page PDF with a six-field AcroForm (full_name, email, phone, date, subject, comments) — a fixture for testing form fillers, parsers, and field extraction.
- Image-Only 'Scanned' PDF (OCR twin)An image-only PDF containing a rasterised 'scan' of the simple document, with no text layer. Paired with the text version so you can score OCR output against a known ground truth.
- Tables PDFA PDF containing a 12-row, 5-column table — for testing table extraction and layout parsing.
- Landscape PDFA landscape-orientation PDF — for testing whether your viewer or converter respects non-portrait page geometry.
- 50-Page PDF (text-light)A 50-page, text-light PDF — for testing page-count handling, pagination, and large-document navigation without a large file.
- Intentionally Corrupt — Truncated PDFAn intentionally corrupt PDF, truncated to 60% of its bytes, for testing how a PDF parser handles a damaged file. Not a valid document by design.
and 105 more in the library.