As the business world continues its gradual move towards electronically-based management systems, communications, messaging and record-keeping, the usage of electronic documents continues to rise and is increasingly relied upon for critical business documents and information transfer. A world that was once dominated by paper is continuing the transition to a world dominated by electronic documents - unquestionably, the leading format for electronic documents is now PDF (Portable Document Format).

PDF formatted documents offer both solutions and challenges for any person or business that needs to send communications in electronic format. The benefits of PDF are obvious - PDF provides a compact file format that can be easily viewed using freely available PDF viewing software. Hence, documents can be easily sent via email and viewed on any computer with a PDF viewer, which is available for free over the Internet from Adobe Systems Inc. (Nasdaq: ADBE). At the same time, there are significant challenges to working with and incorporating information received in PDF by another party. By its nature, PDF is not an editable document format - even though the appearance of a PDF document mirrors what you might see in a Microsoft Word document, it cannot easily be changed, revised or manipulated.