Invented by Adobe Systems and refined for over 15 years, individuals, businesses, and government agencies across the globe have grown to trust and rely on PDF to communicate information and ideas.
A History of Trust
PDF (Portable Document Format) was introduced in 1990 as a way to reliably view, print, and share information with other people. Regardless of the computer's operating system, PDF was reliable and consistent, displaying and printing the same every time. As an open specification, it allowed everybody to "peek under the hood" to see how PDF was built, leading to a broader understanding and confidence in the young document format.
With the Internet boom came a huge increase in the distribution of information as well as an increase in the number of computers, web browsers, and operating systems. During this period of unprecedented growth, PDF emerged as the best way to reliably distribute documents across the web. With Adobe's stewardship, PDF has been adopted by the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) as the standard for archiving electronic documents. One by one, more than a half billion people who use their computers and mobile phones to view, print, and collaborate on documents and forms have come to trust PDF.
Today, there are more than 200 million PDF documents posted on the web. PDF is the choice of government agencies across the globe. More than 1,800 vendors in the PDF ecosystem, worldwide, offer PDF-based solutions including technologies PDF creation, plug-in, consulting, training, and support.
