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Revision as of 11:54, 10 July 2002
Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format (a page description language) developed by Adobe Systems for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents. A PDF file can describe documents containing any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device independent and resolution independent format. These documents can be one page or thousands of pages, very simple or extremely complex with a rich use of fonts, graphics, colour, and images.
PDF is primarly the combination of three technologies, PostScript for generating the layout and graphics, a font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents, and a compresson system to bundle these elements into a single file. Essentially the PostScript (which refers to external items such as fonts and raster images) is interpreted into a tokenized form, any resources (fonts, images) the PostScript referred to are collected, and they are all compressed into a single file.
There are several advantages to the PDF format. One is that there is only a single small file to transfer, whereas with the same file in PostScript format one must send the additional materials on their own. In addition the PostScript code is already interpreted, so it is faster to display on the screen. Finally the PDF system includes a font-replacement strategy that ensures the document will be readable even if the end-user does not have the "proper" fonts installed.
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This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC.