Hi, David.
>As Rich said, there are no royalties due to Adobe for you to create your own PDF file... UNLESS you license their library (mega-bucks) to make the job easier. There are also some 3rd-party libraries that can be licensed for more reasonable amounts (hundreds of dollars) and at least one I have seen for under $100.
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>However, you can crack open a PDF and study the structure and refer to the free docs from Adobe to figure it out. It's just a bunch of collections that are cross-referenced, with an index at the end that points to specific locations in the file for key elements. Then you can spend a few hundred or thousand hours writing your own PDF creator. OK, that's exaggerating a bit. You can create a library to make simple PDFs with simple-layout text only in just a few hours.
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>I studied the structure when working on an annotation project and know what needs to be done... just haven't found the time yet to pull it together and post it.
Thanks a lot for the explanation! This makes things much more clear for me.