The advancement of technology led to the creation of several innovative products that are sure to make our lives easier. Allowing us to carry, view, and read electronic documents on the go is one of the practical innovations we have today. This fantastic feature is possible with the help of Adobe PDF. Without PDF, viewing articles and documents on a computer would remove some of its components, such as images, fonts, and so on. With this said, we can say that PDF is indeed an excellent invention, especially if you are interested in reading and viewing articles on the computer. In this article, we are going to look into the properties and history of Adobe PDF.
What is Adobe PDF?
Before looking into its history, we are going to know first what is the more profound meaning of Adobe PDF. For starters, Adobe PDF is a file format commonly found in computer software with the file extension (.pdf). Adobe PDF, or simply PDF, is a creation of Adobe in 1993, which allows users to present documents without reducing or removing essential components. PDF is a handy extension to use if you want viewers to see your document, including the text, fonts, vector graphics, raster images, and other information.
Adobe PDF is common in ebooks, wherein these digital books usually use PDF to present vector graphics, raster graphics, text, fonts, and other multimedia information. Ever since its early release, PDF made a significant impact in the digital world, allowing readers and authors to create a more interesting electronic book.
History of Adobe PDF
Now that we already have a brief knowledge of Adobe PDF let us now look into its history. We can trace back the origins of the PDF to the early 1990s. During this time, Adobe introduced the Portable Document Format, also known as the PDF, to the Windows and OS|2 conference in 1993. Despite its early introduction, PDF remained to be hidden from the public and was not known publicly until 2008.
The main purpose of developing the PDF is simple: to share documents, which include text and images. Furthermore, PDF’s goal is to reach various computer users without having any restrictions or any problems accessing the files.
John Warnock was the co-founder of Adobe who led team Camelot in researching and developing the PDF. As expected, their work was a success, which resulted in the Adobe PDF. However, the competition was tough; many other formats were developed, aiming to give users an easy way of viewing documents. Such formats included DjVu, Envoy, Common Ground Digital Paper, Farallon Replica, as well as Adobe PostScript. Despite the competition between other formats, PDF remained to be a significant competitor since it was widely used in desktop publishing workflows.
The Adobe PDF might be known for being innovative and useful when it comes to presenting documents, but it also has its downside. During the PDF’s early days, Adobe used software called Adobe Acrobat to read and create PDF files. However, Adobe Acrobat was not available for free during this time. Other factors were known as the format’s disadvantages: PDF does not support external hyperlinks during its early versions, which reduced its usefulness on the internet. This factor made a huge impact on the PDF’s effectiveness since users would be required to download large-sized files despite having a very slow internet speed at the time.
Interestingly, Adobe released its Adobe Reader, which eventually became the Acrobat Reader program to read and create PDF files more effectively. Unlike its predecessor, this program is free of charge and continues to support PDF files. Interestingly, many people considered it a standard for viewing electronic documents because of the program’s usefulness.
Over the years, Adobe PDF has gone several developments and remained a significant part of the digital world. Because of its great design and efficient usage, it is no wonder why this file format is continued to be used until today.