Document Conversion: all about PDF

It’s no secret that the most popular type of document conversion is Doc 2 PDF. But hang on, exactly what is PDF, and why is it so widely used? Read on to find out!

PDF stand for Portable Document Format, and PDF files are recognizable because that’s their extension: they are .pdf files (e.g. Work_Project.pdf). Portable Document Format was invented by a company called Adobe Systems (commonly known as just ‘Adobe’) in 1993. The idea behind PDF is that it’s a medium for document exchange between parties. So I could produce a document using any kind of program, any kind of hardware, and any kind of operating system, Convert to PDF, and send it to you, in the knowledge that you’ll always be able to read it. And how can we assume that you’ll be able to read it? Because Adobe’s Reader program has always been a free download that anyone connected to the internet can get.

It’s hard to overestimate what an important format PDF is. Without it, the process of sending information to one another over the internet would be much more fraught with difficulty, although probably the truth is that had it not been invented, another company would have invented a very similar product.

An analogy for PDF is a third language that two people who speak different languages can easily adopt to communicate in. English plays this role in many parts of the world, but misses out on the ‘easily adopted’ part of the equation.

Another interesting thing about PDF is that as of July 2008, it is an open standard that is publicly available and usable. Prior to this it was a proprietary format owned by Adobe. While this is a definite positive step for users, information technology analysts say that it is very likely that Adobe did it in response to Microsoft’s competitor document standard, XPS. When Microsoft decided to submit XPS for approval as a open standard, there was probably little Adobe could do to avoid following suit.