Portable Document Format

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format (a page description language) developed by Adobe Systems for representing documents in a manner that is independent of the original application software, hardware, and operating system used to create those documents. A PDF file can describe documents containing any combination of text, graphics, and images in a device independent and resolution independent format. These documents can be one page or thousands of pages, very simple or extremely complex with a rich use of fonts, graphics, colour, and images.

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This article (or an earlier version of it) contains material from FOLDOC.