Differences between version 7 and predecessor to the previous major change of PDF.
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| Newer page: | version 7 | Last edited on Saturday, November 15, 2003 1:35:37 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
| Older page: | version 4 | Last edited on Wednesday, August 13, 2003 9:28:42 pm | by JohnMcPherson | Revert |
@@ -1,3 +1,18 @@
PDF is an [Acronym] for __P__ortable __D__ocument __F__ormat. Invented by [Adobe].
-You generate PDFs
using Adobe
's commercial AdobeAcrobat
and view them with AcrobatReader
.
You can use
[LaTeX
] (pdflatex
(1) or LaTeXpdf
are good places
to look) to make good quality
PDF files. PDF
's are very tied in with PostScript files
. PostScript files
can be easily turned into
PDF with the ps2pdf
(1
) command (
which is a wrapper
around GhostScript)
.
+[PDF] files are good for distributing certain types of documents because:
+# They can't be trivially changed by the receiver (compared to emailing MicrosoftWord documents)
+# Because it is a true page description language, the same document should display the same on any viewer. (Word documents are notorious for displaying differently on different machines, depending on the version of MicrosoftWord in use, the fonts available to the machine, and the type of printer that computer is
using as the default printer.)
+# It is an open format, adhering to a published standard. This means that you are not at the mercy of a company that can change the file format forcing you to upgrade software.
+# There are viewers capable of displaying and printing PDF for many platforms, and because it is an open standard, viewers can be written for any platform that doesn
't yet have one.
+
+The PDF format was specified by [Adobe], the same company that helped introduced PostScript
and Type1 fonts
.
+
+
You can view PDF documents with AcrobatReader (
[free
] but not [Free]).
+xpdf
(1) and GhostView
are [Free] programs that you can use
to view
PDF files if you don't want to use Adobe
's proprietary closed-source reader. [KDE] has kghostview and [GNOME] has gnome-gv, both of which
are front-ends to GhostView/ghostscript
.
+
+You
can generate PDFs by using Adobe's commercial AdobeAcrobat, see our [CreatingPDFs] page.
+
+[Apple]'s [MacOSX] uses
PDF for rendering images
(and the user interface
),
which is why you can have true transparent windows on their [OS].
+
+PDF is arguably
a version of PostScript and is certainly a descendant of it in some ways. Calling PDF something other than PostScript II was probably actually a very good idea, since there are already enough different forms of PostScript
around.
