Serialization / Saving PDFs on Server/Desktop

Serialization also known as saving provides the ability to write content back to a storage medium.

Apryse SDK benefits include:

  • Incremental save (for fast save and document persistence)
  • Linearization (Fast Web View)
  • Supports compressed object streams
  • Unused object removal. This option can help you create smaller files
  • Serialize a document to memory, stream, or a file on disk

Save a document

To save a PDF document.

1PDFDoc doc = new PDFDoc(filename);
2
3// save the document to the filesystem
4doc.Save(output_filename, SDFDoc.SaveOptions.e_linearized);
5
6// optionally save the document to a memory buffer
7byte[] buf = doc.Save(SDFDoc.SaveOptions.e_linearized);

Read & write a PDF file from/to memory buffer
Full source code which illustrates how to read/write a PDF document from/to memory buffer. This is useful for applications that work with dynamic PDF documents that don't need to be saved/read from a disk.

About saving a document

PDF document can be serialized (or saved) to a file on a disk, to a memory buffer, or to an arbitrary data stream such as MemoryFilter or a custom filter.

To save a PDF document to a file on disk, invoke its Save() method:

1doc.Save(output_filename, PDFDoc.e_linearized);

The second argument is a bitwise disjunction of flags used as options during serialization.

Apryse SDK allows a document to be saved incrementally (see section 2.2.7 "Incremental Update" in the PDF Reference Manual). Because applications may allow users to modify PDF documents, users should not have to wait for the entire file (which can contain hundreds of pages) to be rewritten each time modifications to the document are saved. Apryse SDK allows modifications to be appended to a file, leaving the original data intact. The addendum appended when a file is incrementally updated contains only those objects that were actually added or modified. Incremental update allows an application to save modifications to a PDF document in an amount of time proportional to the size of the modification rather than the size of the file. In addition, because the original contents of the document are still present in the file, it is possible to undo saved changes by deleting one or more file updates.

Changes can be appended to an existing document using e_incremental flag:

1doc.Save(output_filename, PDFDoc.e_incremental);

Note that the file output name matches the input name.

Over time, PDF documents may accumulate unused objects like old updates, modifications, unused fonts, images, and so on. To trim down the file size by removing these unused objects, use the e_remove_unused flag:

1doc.Save(output_filename, PDFDoc.e_remove_unused);

A PDF document can also be serialized into a memory buffer as follows:

1byte[] buf = doc.Save(PDFDoc.e_linearized);

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