Online Versus Print (cont.)

Portable Document Format

The portable document format (pdf) is a file format designed to address some particular problems brought to publication by the digital age.

The pdf offers consistency and universality for presentation of content, independent of native file format and source—that means, regardless of whether the original file was produced on a Mac or a PC, or whether it was produced in Microsoft Word, Adobe Pagemaker, or Macromedia Freehand.

By 1993, Adobe had identified a problem in the document world. You may have discovered this same problem in your world of document production. When you have invested careful effort in producing a perfect document, perhaps one with extensive formatting, charts, graphs, and pictures, the details of the formatting can be lost as soon as the document is passed on to another user on another machine or who has a different printer.

Sometimes it seems to you and it seemed to the developers at Adobe that the only way to guarantee the fidelity of presentation is/was to print the document and distribute hard copy.

Though printing out copies of a file seemed to undermine the whole reason for having electronic documents, it seems/seemed like digital file exchange is simply not reliable.

In 1993, the original Adobe Acrobat plan was to translate PostScript files into page-oriented, resolution independent, exchangeable (or portable) documents, viewable an any computer platform and unaffected by the associated printing device.