PDF (Portable Document Format) is a widely supported file format created by Adobe in 1992 that allows documents to be shared and viewed across different systems without requiring proprietary software. Since becoming an open standard in 2008, multiple tools—including built-in Windows features—can create PDFs from virtually any application.
PDF (Portable Document File)
Let's come up with a little scenario here. Let's say I was going to host a party and I wanted to invite a lot of people. I'm going to send out maybe an electronic document to them, or a flyer to them, that all these people could open up. Well, what kind of document can all these people open up? One of the answers to that might be a portable document file, a PDF.
If I wanted to create a flyer, I could use something like a text editor to create a .txt file, but this is really basic. It doesn't allow me to have any kind of pictures or background image or anything fancy on it — not even different fonts or different sizes or bold or anything like that. So it's really basic.
But of course, if I had a Microsoft Word document, that's proprietary. Only people that have purchased Microsoft Word, or own something that can open up these doc files, can really then see that flyer. That's where a portable document file, or PDF, comes into play. This is something that people can usually have some sort of viewer for, that they can open up and view PDFs. So we could create a PDF and then a lot of people could open that up and view it.
In 1992 Adobe is the one that created this portable document file, and their whole model was: let's give away an Acrobat Reader, something that can read these PDF documents, and we'll give that away for free and we'll get everybody to install this and use this to be able to view these documents. But what we'll do is we're going to sell the writer, the thing that creates these PDF documents. We're going to sell that. And so that's how they make their money, is off of selling this Acrobat Writer. They give the reader for free and then you have to pay for that writer. In 2008 the portable document file became an open standard. Nowadays you have several options for creating PDFs.
Let's take a look at how we could create a PDF. The new versions of Windows have a PDF creator already in it, and I'm going to show you what that looks like. So I'm going to open this up and just type in "printer" here, and open up printers and scanners. As we can see here, this is a printer that's already installed on this machine — I haven't installed any printers here — so this is Microsoft Print to PDF. So this is not a physical printer, but yet it will save a PDF document. It's built into a lot of systems nowadays to create this PDF.
So whatever program I'm in — let's say this is just a text file that I have up here — I can go file and I can go to print, and then once this print dialogue box comes up I can select Microsoft Print to PDF. Of course this is the only one that's available, so that's the one that's automatically selected. Let's go ahead at this point in time and say print. If we notice that when we say print, it's going to look a little different than a regular printer. It's not going to just start automatically printing to the printer or show me any kind of properties. Instead I can actually save it. So I'm going to save this, and this is just my text doc, and we'll save it to the desktop, and then I'll click on save, and there it is, there's the PDF now that we created with this.
Now if I wanted to open this up, watch what happens. If I double click on this, now this opens up in that Acrobat Reader. So this is the Acrobat Reader program, and I can visually see now this document and be able to read this document.
If I wanted to have more graphics in this and have it a little more engaging, put some nice formatting on it, then what I could do is I could use just any of my other programs, like Microsoft Word, that allows me to create that type of formatting, and do this same process of printing out a PDF, and then it would go to save it.
There is also Creator, and there's still the Adobe writer that's available out there. It's gone by different names over the years, but essentially the Adobe writer allows us to take lots of different documents and compile them together, and has a lot of different features like e-signing. There's a lot of features in it that still create a lot of value with that Acrobat Writer, and so that's still something to consider.
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