[ Thanks to LinuxLinks for this link.
]
“Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format
created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. The format
includes a subset of the PostScript page description programming
language, a font-embedding system, and a structural storage system.“Over the years PDF has become an extremely important file
format. If you want to create documents that can be viewed under
all major operating systems, PDF is the ticket, as it maintains the
overall look and feel of documents regardless of what platform they
are viewed under.“There is a large range of PDF-related software available with
many different applications available that can both output to and
open files. Many open source software save documents to this format
such as OpenOffice.org and GIMP.”