: Designing Professionally themed PDFs I am trying to find out what software goes into designing professionally themed PDFs and would greatly appreciate someone explaining the workflow. I am weakly

@Nimeshi706

Services that decompile web sites use the actual content of the site to determine what is in place. You can't use jQuery without referencing the jQuery library. So, it's a simple matter to see the script source and tout "jQuery is used!".

The Portable Document Format (PDF) is not this transparent. Yes a PDF will tell you what application generated the PDF. You simply need to choose File > Properties in Acrobat and look at the Description tag. Under PDF Producer it lists the application used to generate the PDF.

But this isn't even half the ball game.

A PDF can be generated by any number of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands, of applications. Heck even most operating systems can generate a PDF. Knowing what generated the PDF does nothing to tell you what went into creating the content of the PDF.

For many higher-end PDF presentations Adobe apps are a likely culprit for design. This is, quite honestly, just a "best guess". Most designers use an Adobe application or two and Adobe has done a good job of adding features and tools to generate PDFs from within their applications. After all Adobe invented the PDF.

Design is another matter as well. There's no automated service which is going to tell you how some designer came to the aesthetic decisions they did when creating a PDF. If design could (effectively) be automated, then designers wouldn't be needed and we'd be half a step away from robots taking over the world.

Design is both art and science, automation can't create art. You need human interaction for that. When comparing things to frameworks such as Bootstrap, you have to remember that a human or team of humans determined how and what to use in Bootstrap. Then they simply made their decisions available to others. It's not like some computer miraculously decides Bootstrap buttons should be blue. A person decided that. Why? We'll probably never know. They could have just as easily chose teal, or pink, or orange.

If you want "high-quality, professional-looking" PDF presentations I have no doubt you could search for templates and find some. What you search for depends upon what applications you have available to use and are comfortable with. There are most likely templates out there for InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, QuarkXPress, as well as possibly a ton of smaller applications. This would be the equivalent to using Bootstrap -- a predesigned piece you simply throw your content into.

PDFs are not born as PDFs. They almost always start with some other application to place, size, and determine content. Then that application generates a PDF when told to. PDF is a secondary format. Which means, in most cases PDF is not the format which was used to create the content it is merely the format the content was saved to after being created elsewhere. This is generalizing a bit. You can create PDF forms strictly with Acrobat. However, that's a smaller portion of PDF use and PDF forms aren't about presentation or visual, aesthetic, design in most cases.

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@Rivera951

PDF is an acronym for Portable Document Format, and it's intent is to make a cross-platform document viewer.

Generating PDF from source documents is done as a print function, and that's where it shows up in many common application software menus (Microsoft Office for example)

So you can think of the software that creates PDF files as another print driver.

Unless the person creating the PDF file has put information in the meta tags regarding the source of the document, I don't know if there is anything available that will let you "decompile" a PDF file.

Adobe Acrobat Professional and Adobe Illustrator are the only applications I know of that really let you get under the hood of a PDF file and alter things.

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