Portable Document Format (PDF)

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a paper-oriented, final render document encoding format created and maintained by Adobe Inc. PDF files are all-inclusive of all required resources (e.g., fonts, images, etc.) and therefore, they can reproduce the encoded document as intended without losing resolution or fidelity. Although PDF files may be edited, it is treated in most cases as a final, read-only render format, often as the ‘back-end’ of other formats such Microsoft Word and LaTeX.

Example

BT                  % Begin text object
/F1 12 Tf           % Set the font to Font1 (F1) with a size of 12 points
100 700 Td          % Move the text position to coordinates (100, 700)
(Hello World) Tj    % Show the text "hello world"
ET                  % End text object

The above example is text-based “Hello World” example given that PDF is a binary format.

Paper vs Screen

Even though in DocOps we treat PDF as a ‘paper-oriented format’, in real world usage, PDF files are nearly always displayed on computer screens (including phones and tablets) rather than printed on actual paper. Also, unlike its ancestor, PostScript, it supports digital-only features such as hyperlinks, bookmarks, interactive forms and so on.