Portable Document Format

PortableDocumentFormat, or PDF, is a file format developed by AdobeSystemsInc. A PDF document can represent a paper document in a form close to that of the printed page. To an application like a word processor, a PDF document generator can look just like a printer driver. PDF documents are portable in that the format addresses endian and other issues, letting people build document viewers for many platforms. Increasingly, new printers support PDF directly.

File formats come and go, and it's quite distressing to save an archive copy of a document and then find, when you come to need it, that after you've solved the problem of reading the obsolete physical media, you're stymied by the lack of a program to read an obsolete file format. Plain ASCII text is preferred, for this reason, but has, of course, limitations in its expressibility. Adobe produced PDF so that people could express page layout, and include pictures and diagrams. Then, in a stroke of marketing genius, they produced readers for many systems and gave them away for free. With the help of market timing and deep pockets, PDF has come to dominate this niche and competing formats have withered.

Adobe has achieved much financial success by making products to produce PDF. Today, however, there are a lot of products that can produce PDF files, at least rudimentary (and therefore more portable) instances. There are even PDF print drivers that allow any program to print to a PDF file.

Unfortunately, Adobe have a history of making needlessly incompatible changes to the PDF format. It's not quite as bad as PostScript in terms of the number of broken documents out there, but it's definitely not a stable format.

You may call it unfortunate, but it hasn't been too bad for Adobe's fortunes. :-)

Postscript isn't a format, but a language. That's one of the reasons PDF exists.

But WindowsVista will be having a component called Metro that is supposed to be a substitute for PDF. Wonderful, so it will be portable between various releases of a single operating system.

If you really want to be able to see documents and be able to manipulate what they look like, rearrange by cut and paste, create clippings (copy or cut then paste or create to documents, try PaperPorting.

You can even convert a document into a .jpg or other image format.

Other ways to use the PDF format

WikiBatics

-- DonaldNoyes.20110402

Complaints to PdfSucks