Portable Document Format was developed and introduced by Adobe Systems in 1993. It is a cross platform standard. This means that you can create and access the PDF file on systems with different configurations. As the name implies, it is a compact and portable format. This means it supports sophisticated compression algorithms that compress the file size of the document. It is used for creating interactive documents as it can support multimedia content. The PDF document is a useful format which enables the users to archive and exchange documents. The file format is widely used due to its beneficial features.

There are two types of Portable Document Format. One is native document and the other is scanned document. Native type of document is the one which is created using PDF converter software. These files are generated from an electronic source such as Word document or Excel. The other kind of file format is scanned Portable Document Format. When a physical paper document is converted into electronic Portable Document Format, it is called scanned Portable Document Format.

Features of the Portable Document Format:

As discussed earlier, PDF file format is a cross platform document which can be accessed on any system with different configuration. This application supports advanced compression algorithms as a result of which the size of the files get smaller. The smaller file size makes the document transferable across multiple platforms. The Portable Document Format supports multimedia content with which you can make your documents interactive in appearance. The file format also supports security features. A person can encrypt the files with passwords and protect the content from being misused. Another way of protecting the files is to embed digital signatures or to use certificates. There are times when you need to extract content from the password protected PDF files for any useful purpose. A person can crack the password protected file easily with specially designed tools. This file format also has split and merge feature. You can split one large document into two or more in number. One can even merge a number of files into one PDF document. All these advantageous features make the use of the file format more useful for any kind of purpose. For converting different file formats like word into PDF, PDF Converter is the best choice. You can convert word to PDF or vice versa using various advanced features of the conversion software.