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SECTION 8.6 Interactive Forms
FDF Trailer
The trailer of an FDF file enables an application reading the file to find significant
objects quickly within the body of the file. The last line of the file contains only
the end-of-file marker, %%EOF. This marker is preceded by the FDF trailer dictio-
nary, consisting of the keyword trailer followed by a series of one or more key-
value pairs enclosed in double angle brackets (<< … >>). The only required key is
Root, whose value is an indirect reference to the file’s catalog dictionary (see Table
8.91). The trailer may optionally contain additional entries for objects that are
referenced from within the catalog.
TABLE 8.91 Entry in the FDF trailer dictionary
KEY TYPE VALUE
Root dictionary (Required; must be an indirect reference) The catalog object for this FDF file (see
“FDF Catalog,” below).
Thus, the trailer has the overall structure
trailer
<< /Root c 0 R
key2 value2
…
keyn valuen
>>
%%EOF
where c is the object number of the file’s catalog dictionary.
FDF Catalog
The root node of an FDF file’s object hierarchy is the catalog dictionary, located
by means of the Root entry in the file’s trailer dictionary (see “FDF Trailer,”
above). As shown in Table 8.92, the only required entry in the catalog is FDF; its
value is an FDF dictionary (Table 8.93), which in turn contains references to other
objects describing the file’s contents. The catalog may also contain an optional
Version entry identifying the version of the PDF specification to which this FDF
file conforms.
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