Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) is rapidly gaining acceptance as the standard file format for electronic document distribution and printing.  With Adobe PDF, you can capture the original look and feel of a document, including all the fonts, images, graphics, and formatting of the original application file. Yet, unlike the original application file, Adobe PDF files are compact, platform-independent, and can be shared, viewed and printed by anyone with free Adobe Reader® software.  The general web population has become pretty comfortable with downloading and viewing PDF documents, thanks to the free Adobe PDF Reader application, however, more users are finding the benefits of creating PDFs from their documents and they aren’t sure how to do it.
 
WHAT IS A PDF FILE? 
Created by Adobe Systems in 1993, a PDF, or Portable Document Format, allows you to share any document, created in any software with anyone, on any platform. Basically, it means if I create a document in PageMaker and you want to see it, you can - and you don’t need to have PageMaker to do it.  When the PDF application was first released, the only way you could read or create a PDF file was by using Adobe’s software, which is not always affordable for the average user. Adobe released a free version of Adobe Reader, which made it much more feasible for the general public to receive the PDF files.
 
CREATING A PDF FILE
If you need to create a PDF file quickly and just don’t have the time to research the best PDF creators, download software, or learn something new, Adobe offers a FREE trial of their online PDF creator. With the Adobe online PDF creator, you can convert your first 5 PDFs for free. If you think this is a service you want to use a lot more, you can get a subscription for it.
 
This was merely an introduction to PDF files and what they are. Depending on your needs or your end user needs, there are endless applications, add ons, additional capabilities and such you can get into. If you are sending files to a print publication, dealing with secure documents, multi authors, user interactivity.
 
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