The PDF Paradox: How Does A Risky Format Draw Us Into Its Ecosystem?

If you use the PDF, chances are you’ve come across an endless number of services, tools, and vendors. If you have, you’ve already taken a short walk through the PDF ecosystem—a network of PDF users developers and software applications that are all interdependent upon one another.
Lately, this complex network has been attracting some bad company with recent PDF attacks and vulnerability exploits. Yet, they’re not the only ones.
Who else and what else has gravitated towards the thriving PDF ecosystem? Find out who, what and why.

PDF Creation

It all started with PostScript. Then Acrobat. And now that Adobe has established itself with a strong market and solid software products, PDF creation has drawn the attention of software developers. As a result, users have a number of alternatives to PDF creation software. Here are a few:

Word Processing Apps: As you know, the MS Office 2007 Suite now has the ability to convert to the PDF format directly—just a strong sign that long-time PDF users have had the need to connect both PDF creation and word processing.
Web–based Word Processing Apps: The Internet is now essentially an OS with web apps in which users are creating documents on the fly. And a good handful of these web-based apps have taken to integrating PDF creation.
Open Source Applications: The popular OpenOffice.org guys have been a supporter of the PDF since OpenOffice v.1.1 with a PDF export feature. However, in related news, they’ve been taking it to the next level with a PDF import extension.
Conversion: What better way to create a PDF than from your original documents? PDF converters are one of the main software pillars of the PDF community. Where would PDF users be without them?

As short as this list may seem, the actual list of PDF applications and tools you’ll find on the web is virtually endless. As PDF software now goes above and beyond basic creation, you’ll always find this portion of the PDF ecosystem on the rise.

PDF Viewers

Whether you love the Adobe Reader for the price or hate it for its hack-able vulnerabilities, it makes the PDF system possible. And thanks to the published (now standardized) PDF spec, the PDF world has seen other viewers with a bit of personality.

Scribd iPaper: Faster and smaller than Adobe Reader, this viewer is a Flash widget for viewing documents and PDFs. What’s more, Scribd offers APIs to embed this viewer on your website.
PDFMeNot.com: This candidate may seem like an ironic choice for a PDF list, but this one actually “de-PDF-erizes” online PDFs into web pages. Just enter in the URL and you can view PDF content without a PDF viewer.
Irfanview: If you’ve used Irfanview before, then you know that it can open up a long list of file formats—the PDF format included.
Foxit Reader: Foxit Reader is brought to you by the Foxit Software Company. Initially a network applications company, they’ve gradually focused and concentrated their tech innovation on the PDF format since 2000.
Skim: A viewer especially for Mac OS X that lets you annotate papers among other features.
The nature of these readers say a lot about the users that connect to the PDF network. Whether you’re a Mac user, an impatient user or a user who avoids IE, you’ll find that every application in the PDF market is catered to a thousand different user needs.

Online Applications

Online applications have been toting the most basic PDF support. Yet, the PDF ecosystem is about more than just being able to support and create the format, an aspect that opens up a whole new market. Take a look at the nature of these online services.

PDFHammer: This website lets you edit PDF files online. It may sound contradictory to edit PDF files, but with interactive forms, PDF collaboration and limited editing abilities in Acrobat, it seems that the PDF ecosystem is headed in that direction.
BookletCreator: Digital publishing is one of the main aspects of the PDF format. Using the PDF to create booklets online yourself is one way the PDF world generates “user-ability”.
PDF Filler: While PDF interactive forms are common these days, some of the PDF forms you need to fill out aren’t. Thus, after a PDF form is uploaded, this service converts the PDF into an image on which you can add your own text.
Issuu: Like BookletCreator, Issuu is also a publishing service. But this one doubles as the center of a document social site. On Issuu you can publish your PDFs as an online magazine and then easily share them with other Issuu users or post them on your blogs and websites.
scanR: scanR integrates PDF productivity with popular technology. How? This online service turns your cell phone camera into a PDF tool. Take a picture, send it to scanR and they’ll email it to you as a PDF file.
Being able to interact with PDFs on your desktop is one thing, but interacting with them online is another. When you use online applications, you also interact with a business network.

Formats

Nobody can resist coming up with alternatives to the PDF format. But these alternatives only contribute to the competitive streak among PDF software vendors.

Macromedia FlashPaper2: Even before the merger with Adobe, Macromedia had its own version of PDF: Flash Paper. This format was designed especially for web viewing.
XPS: Native to the latest Microsoft technology, XPS documents are closely based on the same PDF format model with XPS viewers and creation plug-ins.
Ebook Format: Although you can use the PDF as an ebook, the .epub format is not .pdf. While the PDF was designed primarily for page layout and graphical integrity, .epub is focused on screen readability and flowability—qualities for which the PDF is now getting credit.
Unipage: Although a Unipage is a way to save a webpage as a single file, it is also marketed as a way of viewing the page as a portable document.
HTML: There’s a phrase you’ve probably come across a million times when search engine results come up with PDF files: “View as HTML”.
TIFF: The history of the PDF ecosystem also includes image formats. As a multi-page image format, TIFF was the 80’s version of the scanned PDF before Adobe merged with the TIFF specification owners, Aldus Corporation.
While these formats were made to upstage the PDF in one way or another, they provided good competition for the PDF format and its software. The result: better functionality, more software options and confidence in the PDF.

PDF Development

How did the PDF gain traction? The PDF market has always been user driven. Consequently, the PDF ecosystem has gradually reflected user habits and tech trends on a whole other level which developer resources have made possible.

RIAs: As the Internet has been essentially viewed as an Operating System, Rich Internet Applications are growing in popularity. With Adobe AIR, PDF technology has found another niche for which its basic technology can be innovated.
XML: XML is currently a reliable way of exchanging information. Adobe is leveraging this fact to reshape its own format with the Adobe Mars document format.
PHP: As an Open Source scripting language, PHP is well suited for Web development. The PDF functions in PHP can create PDF files using the PDFlib library.
ActiveX: In an era of Microsoft Windows, Visual Basic and application creation, the PDF OCX ActiveX control bridged the gap between developing applications and PDF functionality.

Whether it turns the user into a web developer or gradually changes from a professional work format to a recreational one, the PDF can be used by anyone. Part of the attraction of the PDF is in figuring out how.

Industries And Solutions

As Adobe extended its PDF solutions to enterprise scales, the format gradually gained features and functions that were applicable to sectors other than the print publishing industry.

Architecture, Manufacturing and Engineering: These industries rely on CAD and DWG formats. Yet, these formats can be easily converted into the 3D PDF format which adds versatility to the models.
Government: Governments depend upon sharing information quickly, efficiently, and securely. With the PDF’s features, capabilities and ubiquity, the PDF is only a natural choice for the task.
Legal: As part of the PDF ecosystem, the legal industry can make use of PDF features that make a legal representative’s job easier with bates stamping, archiving and digital signatures.
Internal Revenue Services: No one enjoys filing his or her own income taxes. However, the PDF format makes it a bit more convenient to e-file them with Adobe’s interactive PDFs.

By being a part of other industries, the PDF format has developed an industry itself.