Electronic documents have many different formats. A text document may be simple or straight text and have the extension .txt or .doc, if edited by Microsoft Word. Graphical images may also have different formats, such as .gif, .tif or .jpg, depending on the software used to create and save the files. PDF (Portable Document Format) is a format for electronic documents that permits the viewing and access of files independently of the software that was used to create them. PDF was created by Adobe Systems, Inc.
A PDF file, which has the file extension .pdf, is readable and accessible by anyone with a PDF reader. PDF is very flexible, and there are numerous pieces of software that convert many file types to PDF, as well as software converters that reverse the conversion.
PDF is an open standard, meaning that you do not need a special license to create or distribute documents in this format. In order to be able to open a PDF document you need a PDF reader, such as Adobe Acrobat Reader 
.
Legal Issues
Privacy
While PDF files are very convenient to use to address the need to share with others, the format is also very useful to protect the content of documents from being altered. PDF files are read-only files, so the recipients cannot make any changes to those documents.PDF also comes with a few extra security features like signatures and certificate signatures that confirm the author of the document. Additionally, it permits encryption of the documents and password-protected access.
References
- Portable Document Format (Wikipedia)
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