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                                          57
SECTION 3.2                                                                  Objects



in the name. The name may include any regular characters, but not delimiter or
white-space characters (see Section 3.1, “Lexical Conventions”). Uppercase and
lowercase letters are considered distinct: /A and /a are different names. The
following examples are valid literal names:

   /Name1
   /ASomewhatLongerName
   /A;Name_With−Various***Characters?
   /1 . 2
   /$$
   /@pattern
   /. notdef

Note: The token / (a slash followed by no regular characters) is a valid name.

Beginning with PDF 1.2, any character except null (character code 0) may be
included in a name by writing its 2-digit hexadecimal code, preceded by the
number sign character (#); see implementation notes 3 and 4 in Appendix H.
This syntax is required to represent any of the delimiter or white-space characters
or the number sign character itself; it is recommended but not required for
characters whose codes are outside the range 33 (!) to 126 (~). The examples
shown in Table 3.3 are valid literal names in PDF 1.2 and later.

               TABLE 3.3 Examples of literal names using the # character
LITERAL NAME                                   RESULT

/Adobe#20Green                                 Adobe Green

/PANTONE#205757#20CV                           PANTONE 5757 CV

/paired#28#29parentheses                       paired( )parentheses

/The_Key_of_F#23_Minor                         The_Key_of_F#_Minor

/A#42                                          AB


The length of a name is subject to an implementation limit; see Appendix C. The
limit applies to the number of characters in the name’s internal representation.
For example, the name /A#20B has four characters (/, A, space, B), not six.

As stated above, name objects are treated as atomic symbols within a PDF file.
Ordinarily, the bytes making up the name are never treated as text to be presented
to a human user or to an application external to a PDF consumer. However,

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