The full form of PDF is Portable Document Format. So you pretty much get it that it was created for documents that are supposed to be transferred or shared. Here's some of the advantages of using PDFs- QUICKLY AND EASILY CREATED Struggling to meet every project deadline? Working to improve your document drafts? Striving to complete those file updates? The PDF is designed to keep up with today's fast-paced and highly demanding workload. Creating a PDF takes almost no time at all. Just a few clicks of the mouse and you'll be able to send out those document drafts, create electronic versions of your files, and still manage everything in between. SECURABLE Worried about that all-too-important draft circulating around the office, among prying eyes, or worse yet, over the Internet? The ability to secure your PDFs can put you back in control over your work. Adding watermarks, encrypting data, using passwords - these capabilities are only the starting point in securing your PDFs. Depending on the material you are sending electronically, you can determine and decide on the best security measures that work for you. COMPACT AND ABLE TO COMPRESS LARGE FILES Imagine a room filled with filing cabinets. Imagine large files full of papers needed to be organized and archived. Now, imagine sending them over to an administrator. A filing clerk's nightmare? Not anymore. The PDF can make your job a lot easier. Imagine a single desk with a computer. Imagine file names to scan over, convert and click on. Now, imagine sending them via e-mail. . . . The PDF's ability to compress large files is a worker's dream! SELF-CONTAINED Where viewing the original document source is essential, the PDF is the ultimate solution. It has the ability to exist independently from the hardware, software and operating system (OS) used to create or view the PDF document. What does this mean? It means that PDFs make it not only easy to transmit files between computers with different applications, but also get your documents across clearly and avoid any communication problems wherever possible. Preserving the look and feel of the original source file becomes a priority you don't have to worry about. Source. Why Use PDF - A Backgrounder on PDFs Advantages and Disadvantages
PDF is easy to create, and easy to send to and receive from people. PDF is also quite small on disk, not to mention the speed of the network and the storage space needed for those big files. There are a few other PDF users, and we've had problems getting PDF access to Apple printers, however. As a result, we've switched to the open-source OpenOffice.org suite now. That said, not all PDF makers are open-source projects, and it's easy to get lost when looking for documentation. The problem with the web is that it can get slow at times. A friend of mine spent over 4 hours on Google to find a PDF file he couldn't open. This is even though Google provides a PDF viewer. It's much better, but still requires digging around. And it's certainly not enough of a solution on its own. If you have a.