The story of PDFs began in the year 1990 when the cofounder of Adobe, Dr. John Warnock, realized the need for more digitized documentation. He initiated a project called The Camelot Project, which turned out to be a great milestone in the paper-to-digital revolution. PDFs were declared an open standard in the year 2008 by International Organization for Standardisation (ISO). Since then there has been no looking back for this file format.
The popularity of Portable Document Format i.e., PDF has seen an exponential rise since the year 2008. The reason behind such popularity is the amazing set of features.
Advantages
1. Portability
As the name suggests, PDFs are highly portable. A PDF document can be transferred across various platforms irrespective of various dependencies. Also, you can easily convert PDF to Word or any other file format.
2. Security
The major advantage of using PDFs is that these can be password protected and access to passwords can be given to authorized people only.
3. Compression
PDFs can be easily compressed by decreasing the quality of files. A compressed file can be easily shared in almost no time and it does not take up much space in your system.
4. Compatibility
PDF files are compatible with all operating systems and browsers. They are version-independent and they do not require special specifications to view their content.
5. Reliability
PDFs are the most reliable file formats because they keep your data intact in a document. Images, texts, graphs, and other content will be displayed in the same way.
Disadvantages
1. Cost Of Editing
The major disadvantage of PDFs is that you cannot directly edit them. You need a PDF editor, that can perform a variety of operations on it with no hassle.
2. Layout
The page layout for PDFs is generally available only in A3 and A4, which makes it difficult to see each full page at a time.
3. Huge Size
If a PDF contains a lot of images and graphics, then the size tends to get huge. Various compression techniques are used to decrease the quality of files.
Conclusion
To conclude, we can say that it is not easy to replace PDFs. Though there are some amazing options like The Digital Flipbook and The Online Slider, PDFs remain the top choice for everyone to view their documents because of their versatility. There is no doubt in the fact that PDFs are here to stay for a long time!
