The PDF, or portable document format, has become a mainstay of the computer world, with everything from user guides to newsletters available in the ubiquitous format.
It’s been about 15 years since Adobe released its Acrobat program for creating these files. The drawback is its high cost. But there are alternatives out there that are free, just like the Adobe Reader program — for reading PDFs — which comes preinstalled on most of today’s computers.
The trick is finding the option that’s right for you. And it’s not a bad idea to diversify, since Reader has recently become the target of hacker attacks.
The big plus of PDF documents is that they can be easily passed between different computers. “PDFs are displayed on every computer with the proper software, looking just like the original document. That’s called fixed layout,” says Dieter Brors of c’t, a German computer magazine.
The other plus is that, in general, the contents of PDFs cannot be altered.
That’s a big plus over sharing data with, for example, a Word file. Such sharing can go awry over little things, such as if the recipient has a different printer driver than the sender, ruining the text’s formatting. Such surprises were common before PDF use became standard, says Ulrich Isermeyer, who is responsible for Acrobat at Adobe.
There is competition to the PDF though. Microsoft’s XPS also offers fixed layouts.
“But if I was a manufacturer and had to, for example, distribute a user manual as a document, I would not do that in XPS,” says Enno Bruns of Computer Bild, a German technology magazine, noting that it would not be likely that every customer would have the right reading program.
Acrobat is currently up to its ninth version. “The new version will come this year,” says Isermeyer. Depending on the format, it will be available… Details
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