What is a PDF file?
A PDF (Portable Document Format) is a universal file format that preserves all the fonts, formatting, graphics, and color of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. Adobe PDF files are compact and can be shared, viewed, navigated, and printed exactly as intended by anyone using Adobe® Acrobat® ReaderTM.
A PDF (Portable Document Format) file can be identified by the suffix “.pdf”. This type of file enables you to view and print material that may have been created in any number of formats that are not necessarily compatible with your browser. Many of the forms and other pages on this Web site are stored as PDF files. To open them, you need to use the program Adobe Acrobat Reader. If this program is not already installed on your computer, you can download it free of charge from the Internet. The answers to many of the questions below explain how to use the features of Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to download, view, and print out PDF files. Detailed information on all the Acrobat Reader options is available on the Adobe Web site www.adobe.com/support/main.html.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. This is the preferred format for digital printers. A PDF format allows a document to be opened and printed by a Mac or a PC without changing the appearance of the document. When creating a PDF it is important to make sure that you embed all the fonts. See Book Guidelines.
Most of the publications on this site are provided in Portable Document Format, or PDF. This distribution format allows electronic documents to be transferred between different types of computers, complete with formatting, fonts, pictures and graphics, regardless of what computer operating system you use.
