The PDF Paradigm: Should You Use PDF On The Web?

By David Quaid, director of inbound marketing, KEMP Technologies

It’s been 21 years since Adobe debuted the Adobe Acrobat suite and introduced the PDF (portable document format) file format. Adobe also launched a free PDF reader in order to make PDF ubiquitous. You only had to purchase the software if you wanted to actually create PDF documents.

Self-Contained

Adobe Acrobat and PDF solve a number of problems for document creation and sharing by allowing publishers to create content while preserving the fonts, style, and layout. Adobe does this by embedding the original fonts and images into the one document, which means the reader will see the document in exactly the same way as the original. This is very useful, especially if you’re using proprietary or commercial fonts that aren’t available on every PC.

Ubiquitous

PDF quickly became the de factor standard for sending print and publication proofs, business quotations, corporate invoices, and technical documentation. This was mainly due to the fact that people couldn’t edit or modify the documents and each user would get the same look and feel regardless of operating system or platform.

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