What is a PDF Anyway?

First Some History

PDF stands for Portable Document Format. The format was created by Adobe, in the early 1990s, as a way to completely store a document in one file. At first, the PDF format was mainly used for desktop publishing of documents for print. Companies used PDFs to save posters, flyers, and other similar types of files for physical printing.

The PDF format was not always as popular as it is now was it was controlled by Adobe. In fact, Microsoft Word was the defacto document sharing format. Things however started to change in 2008 when Adobe dropped this ownership of the format and PDF became an open standard. PDFs still have a basic set of properties, but these are independent of Adobe. 

Why is PDF better?

The reason PDF was such a revolution when it arrived, is becuase at the time, professional software that was used to create graphics and documents resulted in unbearably large files, especially when they had pictures, fonts, and other graphical elements embedded. They also required a lot of processing power to produce.

The PDF format changed this as Adobe found a way to gather all the parts of a file and make it into a smaller whole.

The portable in PDF is significant: The format is platform agnostic and therefore PDFs look the same no matter what device they’re viewed on. Whether you’re using Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, Chrome OS, or even Windows XP — on any software and hardware, PDFs stay consistent. The data contained in a PDF is not dependent on the creator’s or the viewer’s device. Including fonts, pictures, charts, and the like is no struggle for a PDF.

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Compared to other documents formats such as Microsoft Word, what happens if your recipient doesn’t have Microsoft Word on their computer? Sure, they could open it in Google Docs or Apple Pages, but it might look a lot different since they all render files differently. If you spent a lot of time getting tables, images, and other elements just right, it might all go out the window. And what if they try to open the Word document on their phone?

In addition to the portability described above, PDFs have several other features that have contributed to their continued popularity.

For one, PDFs allow for fine-tuned security settings. When you create a PDF, you can disable viewers’ ability to print the document, leave comments on it, or copy its text. You can even password protect PDF files. Thus, when governments and businesses put forms online, they can heavily restrict them to prevent abuse. 

The Missing Piece

While its easy to view PDFs files on virtually any platform, the same can't be said when it comes to manipulating them. If you need to merge PDF files together, split them or remove pages, you usually have to buy expensive software to handle the task or upload to untrusted third party server online.

Until now.

We have created All-About-PDF to help you manipulate PDFs at a reasonable cost without the need to upload your files to a third-party server or paying a monthly fee. 

Give All-About-PDf a try buy downloading the trial now.

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How to Merge PDF Files

The PDF format is the default document sharing format for professionals online and offline. It is therefore useful to be able to manipulate these files with ease.

One of the most common tasks when it comes to manipulating PDF files is to merge multiple PDF files together. There are several programs that offer to do this for you however the majority require you to upload your documents to unknown third-party servers or require a monthly payment to unlock the software features.

With All-About-PDF, you can combine multiple PDF files into a single file without having to upload it to a remote unknown server in three simple steps.

1. If you haven't already, download All-About-PDF from here. Once downloaded, install it and run it.

2. Hit the "Merge" card and select all the PDF files you would like to be merged together. You can add more files by hitting the "Add More" button and you can re-arrange the order of the pages by dragging and dropping the pages into the required order.

3. When you are happy with the order of the files to be merged, hit the "Merge" button and then provide the name of the new merged PDF.

Your PDF files will now be merged into a single file and the pages will be in the order you specified.

To get started with merging your PDF files, download All-About-PDF from here.

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