The Portable Document Format — a file format that preserves layout, fonts, and graphics so a document looks identical on every device.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format, a file format originally created by Adobe in 1993 and standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008. Its defining characteristic is that a PDF looks identical everywhere: the same fonts, layout, line breaks, and page numbers regardless of the reader, operating system, or screen size.
Why PDFs are useful
PDFs embed everything they need to render — fonts, images, vector graphics, page dimensions — inside the file itself. That makes them ideal for documents that must look exactly a certain way: contracts, tax forms, academic papers, tickets, invoices. A Word document can shift when opened on a different machine; a PDF will not.
What PDFs can contain
A modern PDF can hold text (as characters or images), vector graphics, raster images, interactive form fields, digital signatures, hyperlinks, bookmarks, embedded fonts, and even video or 3D content. Most everyday PDFs contain text plus images — but the format itself is far more capable.
Common PDF tasks
- Merging PDFs combines multiple documents into one
- Splitting extracts pages into separate files
- Compressing shrinks file size for email
- Converting turns a PDF into an editable document
- Signing adds a signature for contracts