What is a PDF file? Why do we need PDF files?

Aug 16 - 2023

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If we were to ask: Have you opened a PDF recently? Many people will answer in the affirmative, PDF has become part of many jobs, and although many file formats are now fading away, PDF is still a big hit.

But can you ever consider the reasons for this?How does PDF work? Why is PDF important? Why PDF can develop through popularity till now? Let's carry on exploring the answers to the questions together.pdf to word converter offline software free download full version

The History of PDF

PDF is the Portable Document Format (Portable Document Format) short, by the famous Adobe company created. PDF in 1990 as Adobe's "will store everything into a file" solution appeared. At that time, the Internet was still in its infancy, so pdf is mainly from the computer output for printing. pdf files are used by businesses to store posters, flyers and other documents, these documents once sent to the printer can be produced immediately.word to pdf converter online i love pdf

How PDF works

In order to explain the transformative effect of the emergence of PDF, we must first understand the situation at the time. In the early 1890s, graphic design software to generate documents is incredibly large, especially after embedded images, fonts or other elements. Keep in mind that the most advanced personal computers of the time were far inferior to what you're using today, so any little bit of performance was critical.jpg to pdf converter and combine

To solve this problem, software engineers began to use externally linked resources; for example, if you want to use a certain font in a document, then instead of embedding the font file in the document when storing it, you can store the name and installation folder of the font and call it up when you need it. This approach greatly reduces the document size, allowing hard disk space to be freed up.

This method is very convenient on a single computer. However, if you want to copy the document to another computer to run, the problem arises: that computer may not have the fonts you use, and the document will not open as it did. You can imagine, just because there will be no fonts sent together, and led to a pile of your important documents were printed in a mess, that will be how desperate.

The emergence of PDF some of the solution to this problem, Adobe has developed a technology that can be carried out to integrate all the work of the document content to a single file, and let the file size within an acceptable range. Obviously, PDF this method solution than the original operation of the management of the way to be simple and effective.

This advantage ultimately makes DPF become a standard.

Why PDF is so important

PDF's biggest advantage is portability, which means that PDF files look the same on any device. Whether you're using Windows 10, Mac, Chrome OS, Android, Windows Phone, iPad or Windows XP, or any combination of hardware and software that supports PDF, PDFs can be displayed as is.

In general, pdfs are meant to be viewed. What it looks like when you save the PDF on your computer, and what it looks like when someone opens it. Also, as a standard, you don't need to install a PDF viewer at all; modern browsers can open PDFs almost directly.

Why is PDF still so popular?

In addition to the portability we talked about through the above, PDF has several performance advantages that make it widely studied and used.

First, pdf has security settings with parameters. When creating PDF files, you can make PDF text unprintable, unannotatable or non-copyable. With these settings, you can restrict user behavior and publish the processed pdf on the Web according to the needs of enterprises and others. in addition, you can also encrypt the PDF.

In addition, you may not know that PDF also supports forms.PDF producers can add text boxes at any location for fillers to add information. Even if the editing is restricted according to the above settings, PDF viewers can still fill in the required information such as name and address in the retained text boxes. In addition, PDF supports electronic signatures, so you can sign documents without printing them.

PDF has many features, such as annotations, highlighting, postmarks, hyperlinks, dynamic content synchronization, etc. These features make PDF last for decades. Today, most software supports PDF export, and optical devices like scanners output PDF by default. some independent publishers even use PDF to create e-books. pdf is such a simple, versatile, and ubiquitous format that it has become an everyday necessity.

Have you learned about PDF yet?

We've briefly covered the origins, workings, and advantages of PDF. But in a nutshell, the best thing about PDF is that it keeps the formatting within the document intact under any operating system, screen size, browser and hardware device. If you care a lot about the content of the document that others see whether the same as your design, PDF is often a good choice. This is PDF, a birth of more than 20 years of fantastic document format.

By:Jean