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.