Home
Main website
Display Sidebar
Hide Ads
Recent Changes
View Source:
PDF
Edit
PageHistory
Diff
Info
LikePages
You are viewing an old revision of this page.
View the current version
.
PDF is an [Acronym] for __P__ortable __D__ocument __F__ormat. Invented by [Adobe]. [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.
24 pages link to
PDF
:
LinuxEquivalentsForWindowsSoftware
Macron
OpenOffice.org
FileFormat
ps2pdf(1)
AcrobatReader
LatexExample
GreenStone
gv(1)
SpringGraph
PdfLatexNotes
M1122
LaTeXNotes
DocBookNotes
XML
PostScript
CreatingPDFs
LaTeX
Adobe
AdobeAcrobat
TwinView
DSL-302G
XCP
MeetingTopics.2009-03-12