How do developers get away with writing PDF software without paying royalities to Adobe? [closed]

Closed. This question is off-topic. It is not currently accepting answers.

---

Want to improve this question? Update the question so it's on-topic for Stack Overflow.

Closed 10 years ago.

Improve this question

Example: the processtext company,

http://processtext.com/

They hav开发者_Python百科e dozens of PDF related utilities that do not require Adobe's products to be installed. Any while on the subject, are there available code examples for manipulating and processing PDFs?

---

PDF is an ISO spec which Adobe released without the need to submit royalties.

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/pdf/pdf_reference.html

Edit: here is the legal text which licenses the patent for no charge: http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/support/topic_legal_notices.html

For editing and manipulating PDFs, it depends on what your framework/language is. I use iTextSharp, a port to .Net of iText, a Java library. More can be found here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/210029/pdf-libraries.