What is PDF?

Contents - Index - Previous - Next

What is PDF?

Portable Document Format (PDF) is the popular standard for the secure distribution and exchange of electronic documents and forms. PDF is a universal file format that preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source document, regardless of which application and platform were used to create it. Adobe PDF files are compact and can be shared, viewed, and printed by anyone with free Adobe Reader software. You can generate Adobe PDF using Adobe Acrobat software products.

In addition to Adobe's own Acrobat technology, a host of other independent software products and methods have emerged to generate PDF files from applications or data. Generating, viewing and printing PDF files with Adobe Acrobat is easy but reusing them in other applications is not. This is especially true for PDF files containing, or consisting of, vector graphics such as engineering drawings, business diagrams, charts and graphs. PDF FLY helps overcome this limitation by converting PDF files to scalable and editable vector graphics formats for use in popular documentation, publishing and data management systems.

Note: The PDF interpreter in PDF FLY 7.0 is compatible with version 1.7 of the PDF specification. It is backwards compatible and reliably handles PDF 1.3, 1.4 ,1.5 and 1.6 files.

Caution!
Scanned PDF files, or PDF files produced from raster image formats like TIFF, do not contain vector objects. Converting them with PDF FLY will result in a file containing the image file as a single object.