Most of the people hear about PDF before, if try to ask what you know about PDF, I believe most of the people will answer that “PDF is eletronic document file that we can only view, search key, and print but cannot edit.” (I will give the same answer as well). But is the PDF just as simple as that?
What is PDF?
PDF is stand for portable Document Format. PDF is a proprietary file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. You may also secure your PDF with the password, whenever your reader try to open and view the content of the file, they will prompt for the password, else they cannot view your file. To be more secure of your PDF file, you may actually sign the file when you created.
PDF also mean that the eletronic version of document that see on the sreen will be the same as the printed version. Besides that, it is also the same when you try to view it over difference platform such as MAC OS, Microsoft Window, Linux or over the web.
Benefits of PDF
There are many benefits for businesses that choose to use PDF to create their online documents, including:
- Quick and easy document creation, with a point and click user interface
- The ability to secure documents, allowing access limits to other users
- The ability to compress oversized documents into more manageable sizes
- Documents are self-contained, not relying on software or operating systems to maintain consistency.
In order to view the PDF document, you need at lease the PDF viewer. Most of the PDF viewer are free, and you can easily found it on the internet. The common PDF viewer in the market including the PDF reader from the PDF founder – Adobe Reader, Foxit Reader, eXpert PDF Reader and lot more.
For more detail, you may view on Adobe and PDF site or on the wikipedia.
PDF is no longer an Adobe-owned standard. In January of 2007 (2 years ago!) it was turned over to the ISO (International Standards Organization) and has since been published as ISO 32000.
Leonard Rosenthol
PDF Standards Architect
Adobe Systems
Ya, thanks for your response. Just found out that the PDF has been converted to ISO 32000 (PDF version 1.7 developed by Adobe).