Using PDF For Your Online Documents

PDF stands for Portable Document Format, a scheme for encoding documents that include both text and graphic images. While the HTML that is used for web pages also handles both text and graphic images, the document author has less control over how their document actually appears in the browser, because presentation of the content is done by whatever browser the user happens to have. With many browsers, operating systems and display devices in the market, it is almost impossible for the web developer to completely control such things as text width, font, line breaks, etc.

However, because Adobe has made the use of their document reader, Adobe Acrobat, free to everyone, it is widely available on the end-user systems. By using the Adobe Acrobat format, PDF, a document author can strictly control how the document will look, even when displayed in a browser, because almost all browsers will have the Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin for the browser to use to render the content. Sites which provide PDF documents will normally also include a link to the Adobe site so that the Reader program and plugin can be downloaded.

Creating PDF documents normally requires the full Adobe Acrobat product. However, there are several ways to create PDF documents without this expensive solution if you only need to convert a few existing documents that are in another computer-generated format, such as Microsoft Word. On the Web, there's PDF995 and PDF Online, both of which offer a free conversion service. Also, many word processing programs can save documents in the PDF format, so check the one you're using to see if it has that capability (probably under a "File -> Save As" menu item). In this way, things such as spec sheets and marketing brochures can be placed on the web site and viewed (and printed) in exactly the same layout as the hardcopy document.