PDFtalk Snooper

The PDFtalk Snooper is a stand-alone tool for examining the internal details of PDFs.

Download PDFtalkSnooper (~7 MB) Version 1.0.0, 14. May 2018

The program consists of only one file and does not require installation. You could run it from a read-only medium like a CD. Error log files are written to %APPDATA% as SmalltalkedVisualsError<timestamp>.log.

The internal name is “PDFExplorer”, an integral part of the PDFtalk library. For the PDF Days Europe 2018 on the 14th and 15th of Mai, I decided to package the tool and make it available for the public.

When implementing the PDF specification the tool was essential for me to understand how the PDF structures described in the specification were actually used in real world documents. When a new feature was implemented, the first step was usually to make the affected objects to display in a nice way in the Snooper. This meant to add a meaningful portion of the documentation, add the proper attributes like “required”, add a nice icon and decide which attributes to hide in the UI.