“If it’s not written, it never happened. If it is written, it doesn’t matter what happened.”
This line by the inspirational author, Lailah Gifty Akita, in her book Pearls of Wisdom: Great mind, explains the importance of documentation.
Today, most of our documents are online. We simply scan our documents and save them on our computers or pen drives or the internet or anywhere. Most of these documents are in the form of PDFs. But what does PDF stand for?
The Portable Document Format or PDF is a file format that is widely used around the world by different businesses and fields for its fantastic features. What are these features? Let us explore.
1. Security
Our prime concern for sharing and storing our documents online is their security. The data should not leak and get in the wrong hands, which can misuse the information. Here PDFs come to our rescue. PDFs can be password protected and then shared across different platforms. No one can access it except the one who has the right password to it.
2. Portability
As the name suggests, PDFs are portable. You do not have to think much about its dependencies when you share it anywhere. The file is essentially in read-only mode once created, it requires special editors like PDFSimpli to make changes in the content of the file. This type of tool can help you with editing, splitting, merging, or even on how to rotate PDF and save it.
3. Highly Compressible
When you create a file that contains a lot of graphs, images, and tabular data, the size of the file automatically increases. The sharing of such files takes a lot of time and they also take up a lot of space in our systems. PDFs can be reduced in size by some compression techniques.
4. Reliability
What made PDFs popular in the first place? The answer is their consistency across various platforms. You can open up a PDF file and it will show you the same content, in the same manner, you placed it in the first place. Unlike other file formats, it does not mess up the content of your file.
Conclusion
It has been about two decades since PDFs were invented, and they remain to be the first choice of file format for many businesses and office work. It tells a lot about the versatility of this file format that is ruling the world.
