Your landlord sends a PDF and asks you to 'sign and flatten it'. Your boss wants an 'OCR'd' copy. A web form mentions 'embedding fonts'. You nod politely and quietly panic. This article translates the most common PDF words into plain English so you can stop pretending.
Words about the file itself
PDF stands for Portable Document Format — a file that looks the same wherever you open it. Flatten means baking your edits and signatures into the page so nobody can move them. Embed means tucking something (a font, an image) inside the file so it travels with the document. Metadata is the hidden info — author, dates, software used. If someone asks for a clean PDF, they usually mean one with metadata stripped and edits flattened. Most of these happen automatically when you save in Flint.
Words about pages and content
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) turns a scanned image of text into selectable, searchable text. Redact means permanently blacking out content — not just covering it. Annotate is adding sticky notes, highlights, or comments. Reorder is shuffling page order; split breaks one file into many; merge glues files together. Tools live under /reorder-pdf, /split-pdf, and /merge-pdf if you want to poke around.
Words about signing and security
An electronic signature is your drawn or typed name on a PDF — fine for most everyday paperwork. A digital signature uses a cryptographic certificate to prove who signed and that nothing changed since. Encryption scrambles the file so only people with the password can open it. Password protect and encrypt usually mean the same thing in casual use. Try /sign-pdf and /password-protect-pdf to see them in action.
FAQ
Is 'flatten' the same as 'lock'?
Not quite. Flattening makes your edits permanent parts of the page so they can't be moved. Locking (or password-protecting) prevents others from opening or editing the whole file. You can flatten without locking, and vice versa.
What does 'searchable PDF' mean?
It means the text inside is selectable and can be found with Ctrl+F. Scanned PDFs are usually just pictures until OCR adds an invisible text layer underneath, making the words searchable.
What's a 'fillable' PDF?
A PDF with form fields built in — boxes you can click into and type. Different from a plain PDF where you'd need an editor to add text on top.
Knowing the words takes most of the fear out of PDFs. Bookmark this page, then open a PDF in Flint and try the terms out — the rest becomes muscle memory.