Hi, can some body tells about the most common usage of PDF?
Duzy
documentation, can some one tells the most common usage of PDF? Why
every body thinks it's important?
news.ugent.be
You'll probably get as many answers as there are people.
When you have a document in Word, HTML, RTF,... the layout
of that document depends on the application rendering the
document.
For instance: I wrote a book for an American Publisher using
Word. When I said: "please review paragraph 2 on page 14,"
there was confusion because my page 14 (using the European
A4 page format) was not the same as their page 14 (using
the American Letter format).
For instance: I wrote an application for a University that
allows professors and administrators to create official
documents with all kinds of data about students. This is
a web application, but we can't use HTML for visualizing
that data, because the same HTML page showed to professor
A using MSIA can look completely different for professor B
using FireFox.
Although Word, RTF, HTML/CSS,... claim to define the layout
of a document, they don't. They "indicate" what the layout
should be, but the renderer (your Word, OpenOffice, browser
version) decides what the document will eventually look like,
and that can be a problem (see the 2 examples I just gave you).
Plain Old PDF solves this problem: with PDF the layout is
100% clear: you know exactly what information is on each
page and where that information is on the page. It's as if
you make a photograph of each page, with that difference that
PDF doesn't rasterize the page: the information is stored as
vector data (and therefore scalable).
In other words: if you look at the same PDF on a Windows
machine, on Linux, on Unix, on a Mac,... the document should
be exactly the way you expect too.
Because that initial goal of PDF wasn't always true (for
instance: people sent a document to a printing office and
the result was only 99% in accordance with what they expected)
an ISO was proposed: PDF/X, the X stands for "blind eXchange".
This means that if you give a PDF/X conform document to a
press shop, you can have blind trust in the format that the
printed document will be eXactly the way you eXpect it ;-)
Read more about it in chapter 3 of my book (you can download
that chapter for free): http://www.1t3xt.com/docs/book.php
br,
Bruno
PDFrank
More and more courts are requiring lawyers to file their briefs
electronically. Judges prefer digital briefs with the tables of cases
and statutes linked to those cases and statutes to which they refer.
Judges want to see the exhibits included with the briefs. PDF is
ideally suited for this purpose and appears to be the preferred format;
in some cases, it is the only acceptable one.
And if the brief contains data in spreadsheet form, its author can make
the Excel (or Quattro Pro or whatever) file an attachment to the brief
so that the formulas can be examined, if necessary.
Court rules require certain documents to have a specific margin size, to
have a certain font size, to be double spaced. The document can be
stricken by the court if it does not conform. If the document has
footnotes, they too must conform to specifications. Would you want to
entrust that responsibility to Microsoft Word, where the documents will
change when sent to different printers from different computers?
PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) stores documents, and
makes them available to the public, as PDFs. Lexis Nexis File & Serve,
used by many state courts, allows documents to be uploaded as Word or
WordPerfect, but always converts them to PDF. The PDF is then considered
the "real" version of the document.
vasudevram
wrote:
That was a good explanation. Thanks, Bruno!
- Vasudev Ram