1Jun18 introductory facts about PDF files

Even if you’ve never created one, chances are you come across PDF files all the time. So what exactly are these “PDF” files and what makes them so special?

As the name suggests, Portable Document Format (PDF) is an open standard document format. Originally created in 1993 by Adobe, and later standardized by the ISO in 2008, PDF files have become the standard document format for exchanging information on the internet. And with pretty much every organization and government in existence storing content in the PDF format, you can be sure that PDFs will be around for a long time to store your content.

Behind the scenes the PDF format consists of a page description language describing the contents and how to reconstruct it for viewing. Content can include text, images, comments, interactive form fields, review comments and other speciality items.

Unlike proprietary formats, PDF’s can be created and viewed by a myriad of tools regardless of the operating system, hardware or platform. While the PDF specification is supposed to ensure that the content is reproduced properly, there are some tools out there which may not always do so—either because of bugs or failure to follow the specifications.

PDFs generally compress well, making them perfect for transfer over the web or email. On the security front, PDFs can be password protected and are always read-only, though certain items can be written into them such as form fields or comments depending on how the PDF is authored. This read-only aspect makes PDFs perfect for legal documents which cannot be modifiable in order to be admissible in a court of law. This also makes them perfect for things like invoices and contracts which cannot be modified once sent to a client. In fact PDFs can also be secured so that text and content cannot even be copied (in a copy and paste operation) from the PDF.

There are a few minor downsides to PDFs:
*online viewing of a PDF file requires users to first install a PDF viewer plugin—a minor inconvenience, but more work than a simple HTML page would other wise require.
*the read-only aspect makes collaboration of PDFs difficult as users cannot always change the content and are limited to comments.
* Content consisting of scanned images is less flexible to work with than native content. Ie: text cannot be copied and pasted.
*conversions to other formats require specialized software, which we’ve found doesn’t always do a proper conversion.

On the whole though, PDFs are a great, standard format for storing and transferring a variety of content.