This work was created as part of the Data Curation Network “Specialized Data Curation” Workshop #2 held at Johns Hopkins University April 17-18, 2019.The purpose of this primer is to guide a data curator through the curation process for Portable Document Format (PDF) files. As a highly-used document publication format, PDF documents represent considerable bodies of important information globally and have become commonly used for publishing data and related files.Institute of Museum and Library Services RE-85-18-0040-18