I have searched through CPAN and I didn't see anything that specifically mentioned transparencies, embedded / outlined fonts, image characteristics for PDFs. Lots of stuff for creating, editing, extracting basic metadata, but nothing at the level I'm looking for ( at least, not identified specifically). Adobe of course has solutions, but they're GUI-based and part of an overall design suite. I'm looking for a way to do some basic automation. And no, I didn't read through the PDF specs! That is quite vast and complex. I thought maybe a common sense approach, as opposed to reinventing the wheel, might be to see if someone else has solved a similar problem.