PDF format

Printing has evolved considerably over the course of the 20th century, much more so than in the previous four centuries. Since the early 1980s, word processing has joined traditional typesetting: the same machines are used to typeset letters, magazines and newspapers.

Digital printing technologies, popularized in particular by PostScript printers, have revolutionized the way textual and graphic documents are produced: they can now be produced on any personal computer and sent to any printer from one end of the world to the other.

With the ease of producing digital documents has come the need to consult these documents without printing them. This need stems from the new life cycles of digital documents. Previously, they were destined for printing and circulated mainly in paper form. This was the case for administrative forms, user manuals, advertising brochures, books and so on. Since the end of the 20th century, CD-ROMs and the Internet have favored the distribution of documents that can be printed and consulted online. The first documents were distributed in simple formats that could be read on any type of machine; the text format was used with simple coding, ASCII in particular for English-language documents.

The HTML format has made the Web very popular and improved the quality of documents distributed on digital media, but this format does not favor a presentation very faithful to an original, as each browser has its own specificities.

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a digital document format that allows documents to be distributed in a precise, original layout, regardless of the printing technology (screen, offset, color or black & white). It meets several needs:

• distribution of product brochures;

• distribution of works intended for printing;

• the distribution of documents intended for consultation and whose layout plays an important role;

• the distribution of documents produced by word-processing tools, for which we don't know if the layout is important, so if in doubt, we prefer it to be respected;

• communication of documents intended for printing, but which must be approved by a chain of people, like a graphic designer to his client and then to his printer.

A PDF document is usually produced using a word processing or page layout program; all popular programs have extensions or native options for generating PDF. Unlike other well-known formats such as HTML or RTF, PDF documents generally cannot be re-read and re-edited, as they freeze a precise layout, not a document structure. It's a format...