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What is a PDF Document?
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF renders documents in a manner independent of operating system, software, or hardware. A document always appears the same, no matter where it is displayed or printed, on any type of personal computer or server. PDF accomplishes this objective very well.
Generally speaking, PDF preserves columns, pagination, and positional relationships between text and images. Text does not "flow" as in a web page, but is constrained by the layout boundaries. Both real text and graphical components may be present on the page. The presentation is a faithful representation of the original.
In the eBook world, PDF is a de facto standard, because books lend themselves well to being displayed in their original form; e.g. page layouts, margins, the placement of illustrations and images, typefaces, and other intrinsic components are all correctly rendered in a PDF presentation. The display can also be scaled to any desired size, and the orientation can be rotated for ease of viewing.
PDF is particularly useful for books containing text and photographs, complex drawings, etc., the layout of which can vary greatly from page to page. Note that this objective differs dramatically from EPUB, which is designed to "flow" the content of a book in portable eBook readers and mobile devices, irrespective of the book's original page layout(s).
Although Adobe Acrobat (now called Adobe Reader) is the most universal PDF-display program, PDF is also compatible with many types of software, including Adobe Digital Editions, Foxit, PDF-XChange Viewer, OpenOffice, Microsoft Office 2007, Wordperfect, DocBook, Google's online office suite, and many others (you can download and install your own copy of the Adobe Reader by clicking on the Acrobat logo at the top right of this page).
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