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What is a PDF?

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems. Through the years it has become a popular file sharing format for business users. The following lays out some of the benefits

Benefits

Look and Feel Preserved
PDFs have the ability to retain the look and feel (graphics, font, layout) of the original source file. Basically, it is an on-screen representation of what the document would look like if it were printed out.

Compact
Since PDF is essentially just an on screen print out, the size of the PDF is often much smaller than the original source file. The PDF format therefore enables the sharing of documents among parties easily.

Fast to Create
Many products exist that can create PDF documents. Our product, Biz PDF allows users to quickly create their PDFs so that they can be shared.

Can be Secured
PDFs can be made more secure through the use of encryption technology. By encrypting their PDFs, users can help prevent their PDFs from being edited unless the recipient has the decryption password.

Limitations

Difficult to Edit
While PDFs are nice for viewing, they are difficult to actually use for business productivity purposes sucha as editing and making changes. This is not because they are secured, but merely because PDFs are hard to edit.

Various Types of PDFs
Two primary types of PDFs exist – those created by computer applications and those created as images by such mechanisms as a scanner. Those PDFs that are scanned as images look like PDFs but do not contain any textual information inside. This makes their ability to be used almost useless without the aid of sophisticated optical character recognition technology (OCR). Our professional line of products (Able2Extract Professional and Able2Doc Professional) have this technology integrated, therefore offering the ability to extract the text from Image PDFs.