Chas Emerick

For almost 25 years, I've been building tools to work with PDF documents — creating, "editing", converting, searching, obfuscating, extracting data from, and redacting them. Most of that work has been at Snowtide, where I've been the lead engineer for a loooong time on PDFxStream, a PDF data extraction library for Java and .NET. In the process, I've had the opportunity to work with a wide variety of customers and use cases, seeing PDF used and abused in ways I'm sure the original designers never intended.

As a side hobby, I've also spent some considerable amount of time learning of the history of PDF: the context in which it was initially created, the functional predecessors that informed its design, and so on.

All that experience means that I've seen the best and worst of what PDFs have to offer, in dozens of industries and roles. I know how the PDF format itself is designed, and how to engineer tools to work with it well.

I'm hoping to make the content here at The PDF Minute reflect that experience, and hopefully in time it will become an accessible educational resource for anyone that wants to better understand how PDF documents work, why they are the way they are, and how they influence and enable large swaths of modern society.

Sound good?

If the above sounds interesting at all, check out the latest post/episode, and maybe subscribe to enjoy more.