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PDF

15 January, 2016 - 09:48

PDF is a page description language that captures electronically the layout of the original document. Adobe's Acrobat Exchange software permits any document created by a DOS, Macintosh, Windows, or Unix application to be converted to PDF. Producing a PDF document is very similar to printing, except the image is sent to a file instead of a printer. The fidelity of the original document is maintained–text, graphics, and tables are faithfully reproduced when the PDF file is printed or viewed. PDF is an operating system independent and printer independent way of presenting the same text and images on many different systems.

PDF has been adopted by a number of organizations, including the Internal Revenue Service for tax forms. PDF documents can be sent as e-mail attachments or accessed from a Web application. To decipher a PDF file, the recipient must use a special reader, supplied at no cost by Adobe for all major operating systems. In the case of the Web, you have to configure your browser to invoke the Adobe Acrobat reader whenever a file with the extension pdf is retrieved.