PDF (Portable Document Format)

A proprietary format of Adobe Corporation, it has become a de facto standard for transmitting documents that the sender does not want to be altered and for transmitting documents to commercial printers and to the Web for online publishing.

Developed by Adobe Systems, Inc., 'PDF' stands for 'portable document format'. PDF is the de facto standard for the exchange of electronic documents. PDF preserves the fonts, images, graphics, and layout of any source document, regardless of how the original document was created. PDF files can be shared, viewed, and printed with Acrobat, a viewer application available free from Adobe Systems. Documents can be converted to PDF using software products created by Adobe and others. Depending on how they are created, PDFs can also be searchable PDF, either by retaining text from the source document or by having a source image file converted by OCR. Depending on capture methodology, PDFs may retain some metadata.

An Adobe technology for formatting documents so that they can be viewed and printed using the Adobe Acrobat reader.