PDF, the World’s Most Valuable File Format

4 min readMar 15, 2020

While this is a subjective statement, I believe it to be true.

Over the years, PDF files have become a global standard for sharing digital documents and are readable by almost any digital device.

You can communicate with anyone via a PDF document and be certain they will be able to read your communication, no matter which electronic device they happen to open it on. Also, you can be sure that the document layout you view on your computer, will be almost exactly the same when viewed on any device that receives it.

You Can’t Do Without PDFs

Think about the hundreds of PDF’s that move through your life on a monthly basis; bank statements, invoices, reports, legal papers, government communications, the list never ends.

Imagine what would happen if the organizations sending you these PDF documents had no universal format for the documents they needed to send. And having no standard, they just send out files in whichever format that their systems generated.

It takes no imagination to see how you would struggle to read all the crap you get sent every day.

You would be constantly downloading readers for strange file extensions and waiting on-hold to ask centre agents how to open the latest file format that popped in to your inbox.

We Owe John

Luckily for us, a guy called John Warnock fixed the problem before we realized it needed to be fixed.

As a result of his foresight, a universal PDF reader now lives on our computers and smartphones. It links to internet browsers, mail systems, social media accounts and more. And when needed, it jumps in to render in the exact detail and colour its maker intended, any PDF document that comes its way.

Pretty neat!

PDF Usage Stats

Here are some extraordinary facts about the ubiquitous PDF:

· 250 billion PDF’s were opened in Adobe products alone in 2017(1)

· There are more than 20 billion PDF’s saved in Dropbox

· Some large corporations have over a billion of their own PDFs

· Over 70 million new PDF files a day we saved in Google Drive & Gmail in 2016 (2)

PDF History

In the early 1990’s, transferring files between different computer systems was a technical nightmare. And transferred files looked completely different to their original copies.

John Warnock one of the founders of Adobe Systems, decided to tackle this problem by creating a portable file format that would retain layout and formatting no matter which systems it was transferred between.

He tasked a group of developers at Adobe, which he dubbed Team Camelot (3), to tackle the problem. This team produced the Portable Document Format (PDF) we know so well today. (4)

Developing the PDF format was the easy part!

PDF’s Long Road to Global Recognition

Getting the world to appreciate the value of the new PDF format was much harder and took much longer. The initial adoption of the PDF format for tax documents by the IRS in the USA in the late 1990s helped to legitimise the new format (5). From then, slowly but surely, PDF’s started to gain universal acceptance.

By the mid 2000’s the PDF had become popular enough for some critics to suggest that it was risky to allow a format owned by a corporation (Adobe) to become a universal standard. What was needed was for Adobe to release the full technical specification of the PDF format, thus moving the PDF as a de facto standard to legally recognised, de jure standard.

Fortunately, Adobe Systems listened.

ISO Adoption

In 2007, Adobe open sourced the PDF standard and handed stewardship to the ISO (International Organization for Standardization), a worldwide organization made up many of national standard authorities.

This means that the PDF specification is public and is not controlled by an organization that has a financial interest in the format.

The ISO defines the PDF as:

‘… a digital form for representing electronic documents to enable users to exchange and view electronic documents independent of the environment in which they were created or the environment in which they are viewed or printed’ (6)

With this, the PDF became a truly open standard. Since then, many enhancements have been made to expand the reach and value of the PDF format to digital users worldwide.

Next time you click on a PDF, which then obediently opens, at no cost, clean, crisp and supremely readable, spare a second to give thanks to John Warnock and Adobe for the gift.

Written by Ludwig of Compozr the tool for bundling your document stacks into a single indexed PDF.

References:

1) Adobe Fast Facts

https://www.adobe.com/content/dam/cc/en/fast-facts/pdfs/fast-facts.pdf

2) PDF statistics — the universe of electronic documents

by Duff Johnson Executive Director of the PDF Association

https://www.pdfa.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/1330_Johnson.pdf

3) Camelot Project

https://planetpdf.com/planetpdf/pdfs/warnock_camelot.pdf

4) Adobe BLOG: Who Created the PDF?

https://theblog.adobe.com/who-created-pdf/

5) IRS deploys Adobe Acrobat to more than 100,000 staff members nationwide; clear, reliable tax documents in Adobe PDF benefit agency and public