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(Portable Document Format) The de facto standard format for electronic documents from Adobe. Introduced in 1993, billions of brochures, data sheets, white papers, forms and technical manuals have been published in the PDF format.
Render, Save As and Edit
Adobe's free Acrobat Reader and many other applications can display and print PDF files. Countless programs can save documents to PDF; however, changing the content in the file requires Adobe Acrobat or software that features PDF editing.
Why PDFs Are So Popular
PDF solved the font copyright problem and enables document creators to use whichever fonts they have at their disposal. Prior to PDFs, documents relied on the installed fonts in the computer that rendered them. For example, if a document created with the Calibri font was sent to a computer that lacked Calibri, the text would render differently. With PDFs, the font rendering rules are embedded within the file itself. See PDF/X and font incompatibility.
Searchable and Non-Searchable
Text within a PDF document can be searchable and copied unless it is saved as an image for copyright protection. However, if the PDF rendering software offers optical character recognition (OCR), the text can be searched.
For Commercial Printers
A superset of Adobe PostScript, PDF is the standard for commercial print houses. If the printer uses PDF imagesetters, no conversion is necessary; however, if it uses PostScript hardware, the PDF is first converted to PostScript. See PostScript, PDF/A, PDF/X, WWF, DjVu and XML Paper Specification.
PDF Spaces in Adobe Acrobat Studio
Launched in 2025, Adobe Acrobat Studio features PDF Spaces, which are workspaces that hold up to a hundred PDFs along with other common document formats and links to Web pages. Using AI tools, workspace content can be searched, summarized and compared. New content can also be generated.
PDFs Are Size Efficient
Render, Save As and Edit
Adobe's free Acrobat Reader and many other applications can display and print PDF files. Countless programs can save documents to PDF; however, changing the content in the file requires Adobe Acrobat or software that features PDF editing.
Why PDFs Are So Popular
PDF solved the font copyright problem and enables document creators to use whichever fonts they have at their disposal. Prior to PDFs, documents relied on the installed fonts in the computer that rendered them. For example, if a document created with the Calibri font was sent to a computer that lacked Calibri, the text would render differently. With PDFs, the font rendering rules are embedded within the file itself. See PDF/X and font incompatibility.
Searchable and Non-Searchable
Text within a PDF document can be searchable and copied unless it is saved as an image for copyright protection. However, if the PDF rendering software offers optical character recognition (OCR), the text can be searched.
For Commercial Printers
A superset of Adobe PostScript, PDF is the standard for commercial print houses. If the printer uses PDF imagesetters, no conversion is necessary; however, if it uses PostScript hardware, the PDF is first converted to PostScript. See PostScript, PDF/A, PDF/X, WWF, DjVu and XML Paper Specification.
PDF Spaces in Adobe Acrobat Studio
Launched in 2025, Adobe Acrobat Studio features PDF Spaces, which are workspaces that hold up to a hundred PDFs along with other common document formats and links to Web pages. Using AI tools, workspace content can be searched, summarized and compared. New content can also be generated.
Compare the 26KB size of this PDF file with its JPEG and old and new Word formats (.doc and .docx). These four files are the same single page of text. Whereas PDF and Word formats are aware of the file's contents, the JPEG is just a matrix of pixels (see JPEG and DOC file).