In your own language

At a glance

If you opened these docs, saw them in a language you actually read — not just one you can decode — and your first instinct was to look twice, maybe to read a sentence or two just to check whether they flow, then we already understand each other. That double-take is the whole reason this page exists. If you are reading this in a language other than English right now, that is exactly what we hoped for.

The space between understanding and loving

The languages of software design are written in English, and for most engineers an English manual is the most ordinary thing in the world. With a little tooling it is perfectly workable. But if your first language is not English, you know the feeling that something still sits between you and the page — a thin, constant layer of translation you do in your own head while you read the reference and again while you write your own.

We know it because it is ours too. We are engineers whose first language is not English, who have spent years reading manuals in English and writing docs and code in English. So we feel, more sharply than most, the gap between an article you simply read and one you have to work to understand. Both can leave you informed. Only one leaves you at ease. Being able to understand something and being able to enjoy it are not the same thing — and that difference is what this whole effort is about.

Why eighteen languages

When you scroll the language list and count close to twenty entries — some of them not the most globally dominant languages — that is not an accident, and it is not a box being ticked. It is there because we want you to like this: the product itself, and the thing it is built around. PDF is a system built on rules — a portable document format defined, down to its object model and syntax, by a formal standard (ISO 32000-2). We find that quietly fascinating, and we would like you to find it fascinating too.

That is also why some of these articles read less like a dry reference and more like an approachable story about how PDF actually works. If one of them explains something you had never heard of — don’t worry for a second. It isn’t only you. A page that teaches you something new about the format, in language you can relax into, is a page doing its job.

Especially for Southeast Asia

The major world languages were a given. What we went out of our way to add were Southeast Asian ones — Indonesian, Thai, and Vietnamese. Europe, the Americas, and Northeast Asia have long, deep software cultures and have long had documentation to match. Southeast Asia has one of the fastest-rising software scenes anywhere — and yet first-class native-language documentation still tends to reach it last. We did not want to be one more tool that treats it as an afterthought.

And whoever you are — a student, a junior engineer on a first real project, an independent builder, a team folding PDF into your stack — we want the same thing for you: the plain joy of making something that works, and the small, real satisfactions you only get from understanding what you are doing while you do it. It is easier to fall for a craft when the manual is not also an obstacle.

What this actually costs us

Even leaning on machine translation, every additional language is a large and continuing maintenance cost — and a machine-translated draft is only the starting line. Getting from “the words are translated” to “the article is genuinely understandable, and reads naturally to someone who thinks in this language” is hard, human work, and it is an area we pour real effort into. Good documentation is held to a quality bar that includes being understandable by its actual reader (ISO/IEC/IEEE 26514); for us, that bar does not move just because the reader’s language changed.

So when a translation lands well, please take it as what it is meant to be: not a convenience feature, but a small act of care from one group of engineers to another.

A note to whoever is reading

If a passage reads stiff or wrong in your language, tell us — we treat a documentation defect the way we treat any other engineering defect. That is how it gets better.

More than anything, we hope you read this in the language you think in, and that somewhere in here you come to like PDF a little more than you expected to, and building things a little more than you did this morning. If this is your first serious encounter with PDF, or with PHP — welcome. We started exactly where you are: curious, slightly outside the English-speaking centre of gravity, and glad to find a manual that finally felt like it was talking to us. We wrote this one so it could talk to you.

Documentation as a product — the quality discipline behind these docs, of which localisation is one part.
The company behind NextPDF — who we are and why a commercial product became open core.
Open core, no lock-in — the licensing model that lets us keep investing in work like this.