Difference between revisions of "PDF, Everything you ever wanted to know"

Latest revision as of 07:07, 19 October 2015

PDF, the portable document format

• Everything you ever wanted to know about PDF.
  • created to get away from all the dependencies of different operating systems and word processing applications.
    • Takeaway: There are many versions of the PDF format; not all PDF documents will behave the same.

PDF Trivia

• Created by Adobe Systems in 1993
• Submitted to ISO as a standard in 2008 --ISO 32000-1

PDF software

• List of PDF Software on Wikipedia

Viewing

Desktop Applications

• Browsers {Chrome, Firefox, Safari}, have native ability to read PDF by virtue of pdf.js library, the simplest, but not the most reliable, nor the fastest.
• Adobe Acrobat Reader now deceased? Now it's Adobe Acrobat DC
• SumatraPDF for Windows, is the best <-- That's a matter of quantitative fact & because of the GNU GPL!
• Preview for Macintosh
• Evince for GNU/Linux

Mobile Applications

• Android: Document Viewer, on F-Droid Repo, on Google Play
• Android: Google PDF viewer
• Android: Adobe Acrobat Reader on Google Play
• iOS: iBooks

Export as

Most applications have an ability to export as a PDF document:

• MS Excel
• MS Word
• MS PowerPoint
• Libre Office Writer
• Libre Office Calc
• Libre Office Presentation
• Google Sheets
• Google Doc
• Google Slides

Edit (Import)

as text

• Libre Office Writer
• Microsoft Word
• Adobe Acrobat Professional

as graphic

• Inkscape
• Libre Office Draw
• GIMP
• Adobe Photoshop

Merging

• Adobe Acrobat Professional
• Microsoft Word
• Libre Office Writer
• PDFSaM (Split and Merge)
• smallpdf.com - free of charge! Works on Mac and Windows, since it's a web application, just requires a browser.

Shout out to DuckDuckGo search engine for bursting my filter bubble