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PDF files are all over the internet — publishers use them almost exclusively,and if you try to download any academic papers, the links usually come witha 'PDF warning', just in case you don't feel like downloading a few megabytesof document and potentially opening up a separate window just to read the content. A lotof applications don't even have a 'print' option; they just export a PDF viewwhich you can then print from Acrobat. So what are these PDFs? Why PDF ratherthan HTML?

The truth is that PDF, or Portable Document Format, gets sort of abad rap from users who inevitably compare it to HTML, but this isn't entirelyfair, since PDF is optimized as a format for printing and concise documentspecification. By design, an HTML document is supposed to render in whateverformat looks best for the user agent; PDF, on the other hand, is supposed tolook exactly the same whether it's viewed on screen, on paper,on a mobile device, etc. How faithfully it does so is, of course, subject tothe limitations of the target device (printers have a much higherresolution than any computer screen), but Adobe puts a lot of effort intopreserving fidelity across targets.PDF has been around since the early 90's, havingevolved from an earlier format called PostScript. Both wereconceived and controlled by Adobe, a company that was founded by two of theengineers from Xerox who worked on the original desktop computer design.

PostScript is actually a fully-featured programming language. You can defineprocedures, conditional operators, variables, etc. PostScript is 'Turingcomplete'. However, PostScript is a programming language meant for printersto interpret, and PostScript 'programs' ordinarily describe what a page orset of pages should look like. The PostScript commands are transmitted, insource code form, to the printer, which interprets/compiles the commands,updates the global state, and executes the commands which generally involve making physical marks on paper.

If you have access to a laser printer, it probably supports PostScriptdirectly (I've had good luck with HP support for PostScript). Figure 1 is a complete PostScript program; you can send thisdirectly as text, without any preprocessing, to a PostScript capable printer.For example, if you save figure 1 as 'hello.ps' and your printer is atIP address 192.168.1.2, you could do this:and the output should look like Figure 2.

Figure 1: PostScript file

Figure 2: Printed PostScript file

The point being that PostScript is a text format for printers to interpretdirectly. Now, programming in PostScript is sort of like programming inassembler — you have infinite flexibility, but infinite tedium as well.PostScript doesn't even figure out where the line breaks should go on thepaper; you're responsible for determining when you've reached the end of theline/page and move to a new one. (The technical term for this process istypesetting).Even the most die-hard of command-line fanatics don't program directly inPostScript but instead use a preprocessor like troff to deal with thetypesetting. Troff input looks like Figure 3 and can be typeset and fed toa networked (PostScript capable) printer via a command like:

Figure 3: Troff source

With Troff, document authors could take advantage of some features thatHTML authors or MS-Word users of today take for granted such as automaticcomputation of line breaks or justified alignment. Still, you can't say thatFigure 3 is particularly readable — before proofreding [*] it, you'd need to convert it to PostScript andprint it out(!).To save a few trees, on-screen PostScript readers likeGhostScript were created.

Still, as a shared document format, PostScript had some problems. In orderto view a PostScript file onscreen, the entire embedded program had to beinterpreted and run. There was no possibility of random access, since theprogram itself maintained a global state — in order to show the user page 700, for example, the viewer program had to parse and intepret thefirst 699 pages so that the application would be in the correct state.In the early 1990's, Adobe started work on what they called the PortableDocument Format which aimed to unify printer-friendly and screen-friendly formatting. Like PostScript, PDF is a text format which describeswhat a printer ought to do in order to display it; however, general programmingconstructs like loops and variables were removed to make random-accessfeasible.

Figure 4 is pretty much the smallest parseable PDF file you could put together.

Figure 4: Hello, World PDF

If you download this file and open it in Acrobat,you'll see a simple output similar to the one in figure 5; however, if youopen the same file in a text editor like Notepad or vi, you'll see that it'sidentical to figure 4.

Download it, don't copy-paste it, because line-ending conventions matter here — I'll get to why below.

Figure 5: Hello, World PDF rendered

Figure 4 might seem a little opaque at first, but if you start to look at it, youcan begin to see some regularity here. First, you see that there are regulardelimiters obj and endobj. There are 6 of these, and each is given asequential number. The obj entries are followed by an xrefentry, a trailer entry and a startxref entry. PDF's areactually designed to be read 'backwards' starting at the end. The very lastentry before the %%EOF delimiter is the startxref entry:This is apointer to the cross-reference file. In this example, the xref file startsat byte 488 of the file.

This is why line-ending conventions matter; on a Windows machine, a texteditor would save CRLF pairs for line endings, which would change the locationsof the object entries within the file.

If you follow this backwards, you'll see that the startxref entrypoints to the line that reads xref. This section, which starts fromthe xref token and runs to the trailer section, is a list ofpointers to the other objects in the file:The first line declares therange of pointers listed in the cross-reference section; in this case, theobjects numbered 0 through 6 (the top line) are declared here. The remaining lines identify,one per line, the location of an object in the file. The first object isobject #0, which, you'll notice, doesn't appear anywhere in the file. PDFrequires that object #0 is declared as 'free'; this is the meaning of thef at the end of the line. What about the 65535 in between the 0000000000and the f?

65535 is the generation number. PDF allows documents to be revisedand rolled back, with their revision history stored within the document itselfrather than in an external revision control system. For this reason, everyobject in the file includes a generation number which starts at 0 when thedocument is authored for the first time and increments by one each time arevision to the object is made. You probably won't come across PDF files withnon-zero generation numbers 'in the wild' unless you deal with professionalpublishing software. Here, object #0 is at generation #65536 (the max), butall the others are at generation 0 — brand new.

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So, this cross-reference table identifies 6 objects. The number of each objectis given by its position in the list, so line 1 locates the first object,line 2 the second, and so forth.It's worth noting also that PDF doesn't require the numbers to appear sequentiallyin the file, and in general, PDF document creator software outputs them in afairly random order; hence the need for the cross-reference table at the end.For this simple example, I put them in order because I'm not dealing withtoo many objects. However, this is a toy example — even the one-page newsletter that my kids' elementary school sends out each week declares a fewhundred objects.

So, I've been talking a lot about 'objects'. What's a PDF object?You can see from figure 4 that an object is delimited by obj/endobj tags. In this example, each of the objects is additionallydelimited by <<>> pairs, but thisisn't strictly a requirement; PDF allows all sorts of types to occur asobjects, but most of the time, you'll see that they're <<>>-delimited dictionary objects.PDF defines six type of objects: boolean (true/false), numeric, string, name, arrayand dictionary. Numerics and booleans can be recognized by their contents,but the other four have special delimiters that identify them to the parser.strings are delmited by parentheses (), names by slashes /, arrays by brackets[] and dictionaries by what are technically referred to as 'guillemets' which is what the French use for quotation marks but what you and I (unless you're French) would probably just call 'double angle brackets' <<>>.(Note that this is specifically two 'less-than' signs and two 'greater-than'signs; not the more correct « » characters «»)

In this example, all of the top-level objects are dictionarieswhich are name-value pairs where the names are name types andthe values are any other type of object, including another dictionary. Alsonotice that, at the very end, after the xref section, there'sa trailer which contains a dictionary object. The most important elementof this dictionary is the Root entry which is a pointer to (surprise) the'root' of the document.

As you can observe from figure 4, top-level objects are numbered; each onemust be given a unique number, and each should appear as an entry in thecross-reference table. Once this is done, pointers (or references) can be used in place of actual objects anywhere in the file. You see thisthroughout the file — references are specified as object_number generation_number R. So, 1 0 R is a pointer to object 1. Wherever a reference is encountered, the PDFparser replaces the reference with the object being referenced. In fact, you can think of figure 4 as being expanded as shown in figure 6:

Figure 6: expanded PDF example

This isn't a valid PDF — content streams can't be embedded insideother objects this way, and the Parent element of the Pagedictionary must be a reference to a referencable object which it can't bein this case — but this demonstrates logically what the PDF parserdoes at display time.

So, turning back to the trailer:

The most important entry in the trailer dictionary is the/Root declaration — this is a reference to the Catalogobject. The Catalog object:in turn points to the pages object:which describes, at a high level, the structure of the document. In particular,this document has one page (the /Count entry) whose descriptioncan be found in /Kids. Notice also that the /Kids entry is a[]-delimited array, not just a bare reference like the others.The single page is described in object 3:Here, finally, we're starting to get to the meat of the document. First ofall, the /MediaBox entry describes the actual size of the pagein 1/72s of an inch — 614x794 ≈ 8.5'x11', the standard U.S. pagesize.

Additionally, there's a reference to a /Resource entry:The most important part of this is the /Font declaration whichis a list of fonts. In this case, the document has only only font, so there'sa single reference to a font object:This is the smallest font description you can legally put together in a PDFdocument; since PDF is specifically a printing language, you can imagine thatit has a lot of support for font descriptions. In fact, you can completelyspecify the geometry of a font within a PDF document so that the printer canreproduce the font exactly as it was originally described. I'll leave thatto PDF software and fontophiles, though, and turn finally to the actualcontent of the single page of this document:Here, the object starts out as a dictionary, but is followed by a streamdeclaration. This stream contains a series of commands that the printershould execute to display the page. This format is somewhat reminiscent ofPostScript, but deliberately scaled back so that the page is a standaloneelement. This is executed as:

Besides the text translation matrix on the third line, you should find this pretty self explanatory.One thing to note is that each line ends with a 'command' which is precededby its arguments. So what is the Tm command all about? Well, inits most primal form, a document is just a collection of polygons— arbitrary shapes made up of straight and curved lines, optionallyconnected to one another and filled in. Letters on the page — glyphs, to be technical — arejust shapes as far as the printer is concerned. Fairly intricate ones, nodoubt, but still just shapes. So, from the printer's perspective, the wholedocument can be specified as a series of points on a Cartesian coordinatesystem which need to be connected together and filled in. This wholecoordinate system is subject to a transformation at any time; this transformationis compactly specified as a matrix which will be applied to each point. Iwon't go into the vagaries of matrix operations and affine transformationshere (I talked a bit about it last month),but the net result of the matrix specified in this example is to scale(enlarge) the shapes to 12 points and move them to position (10,750), measuredfrom the lower-left corner of the page.

A full introduction to the PDF formatting language would take a book; PDFalso has commands for drawing arbitrary lines in any color, specifying userinteraction, downloading additional content from the internet, etc. However,all PDF documents follow this same format — page objects specify commandsto be executed by the printer which should translate to a printed page.

Figure 4 is longer than it strictly needs to be; I've added a lot offormatting for readability. Since PDF isn't actually designed to be human-readable, documents are usually compressed by the removal of superfluous whitespaceas illustrated in Figure 7.

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Figure 7: Compacted Hello, World PDF

The only required whitespace is after the endobj tokens and beforenumbers.Notice in particular the lack of whitespace before the name tokens andtheir value tokens as in:This is three individual dictionary entries, all run together on a singleline with no intervening whitespace. Since '/' is not a valid name token character, the parser will know uponencountering it that the name part of the token is complete and the valuepart begins.

Since content streams are usually pretty long, PDF additionally allows(and virtually all applications take advantage of) the content stream for eachpage to be compressed within the document itself. PDF supports bothFlate compression and LZW compression of content streams. Of course, images can also be embeddedand can be compressed as well, including as JPEG streams. The tiny contentstream in figure 5 is hardly worth compressing, but most PDFs include hundredsor thousands of typesetting commands, which are repetitive and lend themselveswell to Lempel-Ziv style compression. In reality, the object declarationsare pretty repetitive as well; however, if those were compressed, the wholedocument would need to undergo a decompression stage before the viewer couldstart rendering it, so PDFs are virtually always uncompressed except for theircontent streams and embedded graphics.

If you open pretty much any other PDF file in a text editor, you'll noticethat the top two lines probably look like this:The meaning of the '%PDF-1.6' part if obvious enough; this tells the openingapplication that this is a PDF file conformant to revision 6 of the specification, but what about the garble that follows it? This is a comment,so it's ignored by the PDF reader, but it serves as a warning that thisdocument contains non-ASCII characters (which will invariably be the caseif the document compresses its page content streams, which documentsinvariably do).

Putting the cross-reference table at the end of the document simplifies thejob for the document creator, but it creates a poorer user experience for theconsumer of the document, since the whole document must be scanned before therendering software can do anything with it. If a PDF is created once and printed in total onpaper, this makes sense — since the only human interaction with thefile is that of the author generating it, the process ought to be optimizedfor him. However, modern PDF usage has a PDF file being viewed far moreoften onscreen than in printed form, so Adobe came up with the 'linearized'form to streamline the generation of a viewable PDF. One of the main differencebetween linearized and non-linearized is that the cross-reference table comesat the front. This creates more work for the document authoring application,since the first byte of the file can't be output until the offsets of eachobject are known. However, this means that the user can jump to a page fromthe table of contents as soon as the first few kilobytes of the file havebeen processed; for a document containing many hundreds of pages, this canbe a significant advantage.

*: Yes, that was a joke

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Explore the World of Solitaire with 385 Different Versions in BVS Solitaire Collection!

Reviewed by: Hillary

• What's Free - Play game for 100 minutes.
• File Size - 8 MB
• Play It On - Win XP/Vista/7
• Support - BVS Solitaire Support

DFG Exclusive Review Summary

• Tip-of-the-Day displayed each time you open the game, and you can scroll through and see all the tips.
• Plenty of games (385) and a compilation of your statistics for each.
• Tells you a game's difficulty before you play it and whether it is more skill or luck based.
• Decent graphics with a choice of backgrounds and card backs.

• Amount of games can become overwhelming.
• No random game feature, so you have to choose exactly what you want to play from a large list.
• No animations, music or other features at all.

› Read Full BVS Solitaire Review

Game Description

Solitaire Games Galore

With 385 versions of solitaire, this collection is a dream come true. Choose from solitaire games like Baker's Dozen, Courtyard, Simple Simon, and many more games ranging from easy to difficult.

A Unique, Relaxing Playing Experience

Play old favorites or learn a new version of solitaire every day with this collection. Each game has rules and a demo to teach you how to play quickly and easily.

Change the background or card back designs to personalize your playing experience and create a relaxing atmosphere that's all your own. The save feature allows you to come back to any game. View your statistics to see how well you've done on your past games.

Endless Entertainment

There's always a new version of solitaire to learn in this game. With this many interesting versions of solitaire in one easy place, boredom no longer has a place in your life.

If you're a solitaire fanatic or just looking for some excitement, BVS Solitaire Collection won't let you down. Start dealing those cards!

BVS Solitaire Collection Review

- Review by Hillary

BVS Solitaire is a fairly well put together collection of solitaire games for the solitaire enthusiast. It boasts 385 different solitaire versions and decent graphics, and allows the player to choose from several brightly-colored backgrounds and a wide variety of card backs. With a game for every day of a year and then some, BVS Solitaire will provide hours of card-clicking fun.

More Variations Than You Can Probably Play

BVS Solitaire offers an incredible 385 different versions of solitaire for the both solitaire enthusiast and the beginning player, including Klondike (the version that comes with every Windows operating system), Golf, TriPeaks, Free Cell, Pyramid, Yukon, Parade and Baker's Dozen. Each has different rules and strategies, but for the most part the goal is the same. Generally, you must clear all the cards in the tableau (piles of cards you need to get rid of) by stacking them in some way.

For Klondike, the method is to stack the cards chronologically from Ace up to King, alternating color as you go. For TriPeaks, you must clear all the cards by clicking on cards that either directly above or below the starter card in value, regardless of suit or color. This means that if the starter card is a Jack, you can either clear a 10 or a Queen, and so on.

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Nice Help Features For Learning New Solitaire Types

Most players will not have encountered many solitaire games beyond the typical Klondike version. BVS Solitaire provides a great Help feature that instructs you in fairly easy to understand language how to play each game. It explains your goal, the rules, and how to win, and includes definitions for those hard to understand words like tableau and foundation.

The Help window is accessible at any time from the game screen should you forget some of the rules or require further help. This is a great feature and very helpful, especially for newer players, especially because it tells you how hard the game is, meaning either Easy, Medium or Difficult and whether winning that particular game is more skill of luck based. Some of the hardest games, like Golf, are based entirely on skill and are very difficult, while Klondike is a 50-50 mixture of skill and luck and is relatively easy by comparison.

Probably Not Interesting to Younger Players

Unfortunately, the audience of BVS Solitaire is still pretty limited because of the nature of the game. It isn't something younger players would be able to grasp easily or even be entertained by, because there is little that is very visually or aurally stimulating, and most of the games require a deep understanding of the rules.

Decent Graphics, Minimal Sound

The graphics are fairly well done, and are relatively sharp and clear, with large icons for the important buttons (like Undo Move, Statistics, Auto-Complete and Help). While they are better than most solitaire collections, the graphics will not blow you away by any means. There are some colorful backgrounds and you are able to change the card backs, but there are no animations other than the cards moving around the screen. There are also only accompanying sound effects, but no music, making the game feel sort of disconnected. The sounds effects don't add anything to the game but don't detract much from gameplay either.

Meant For the Solitaire Entusiast

The gameplay is somewhat addicting for the solitaire enthusiast, but casual players will likely find it repetitive and potentially boring. The different games all end up feeling pretty similar, since they are all played a similar way with pretty similar rules, and without a storyline or other overarching feature, there is no end goal other than getting high scores on your games of choice. This limits the audience and means that most player will not want to play for very long at a time.

There is also no random game feature, so player will have to become familiar with the huge selection in order to really progress through it. On the other hand, BVS Solitaire has a Tip-of-the-Day feature that pops up every time you open the game, with the ability to scroll through and see all the tips if you choose.

Conclusion - Recommended for Solitaire Fanatics

In general, BVS Solitaire is a fairly good collection of solitaire games that are fun to play. While the audience is limited by the rules of gameplay, the overwhelming amount of games to choose from with no random game feature, the lack of audio-visual stimulation, and repetitive nature of the game of solitaire, the collection itself is fairly well done and will provide hours of fun to the solitaire fanatic.

While not the best card game out there, BVS Solitaire is one of the better solitaire collections to play. If you love solitaire, or want to find a few solitaire games you can become really good at, give it a try and you are sure to find at least one solitaire version you enjoy.

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BVS Solitaire Collection

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