SECTION 3.2
57
Objects
in the name. The name may include any regular characters, but not delimiter or
white-space characters (see Section 3.1, “Lexical Conventions”). Uppercase and
lowercase letters are considered distinct:
/A
and
/a
are different names. The
following examples are valid literal names:
/Name1
/ASomewhatLongerName
/A;Name_With−Various***Characters?
/1 . 2
/$$
/@pattern
/. notdef
Note:
The token
/
(a slash followed by no regular characters) is a valid name.
Beginning with PDF 1.2, any character except null (character code 0) may be
included in a name by writing its 2-digit hexadecimal code, preceded by the
number sign character (
#
); see implementation notes 3 and 4 in Appendix H.
This syntax is required to represent any of the delimiter or white-space characters
or the number sign character itself; it is recommended but not required for
characters whose codes are outside the range 33 (
!
) to 126 (
~
). The examples
shown in Table 3.3 are valid literal names in PDF 1.2 and later.
TABLE 3.3 Examples of literal names using the # character
LITERAL NAME
RESULT
/Adobe#20Green
/PANTONE#205757#20CV
/paired#28#29parentheses
/The_Key_of_F#23_Minor
/A#42
Adobe Green
PANTONE 5757 CV
paired( )parentheses
The_Key_of_F#_Minor
AB
The length of a name is subject to an implementation limit; see Appendix C. The
limit applies to the number of characters in the name’s internal representation.
For example, the name
/A#20B
has four characters (
/
,
A
, space,
B
), not six.
As stated above, name objects are treated as atomic symbols within a PDF file.
Ordinarily, the bytes making up the name are never treated as text to be presented
to a human user or to an application external to a PDF consumer. However,