A document format developed by Adobe that faithfully preserves text, images, and vector graphics across all platforms and devices.
PDF (Portable Document Format) was created by Adobe in 1993 and standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008. It preserves layout fidelity regardless of operating system or device, making it the de facto standard for distributing business documents, academic papers, and contracts.
Internally, PDF can contain text, vector paths, and raster images in a single file. Embedded images are individually compressed using JPEG, JPEG2000, CCITT, or Deflate. Multi-page support makes PDF ideal for scanned documents and photo collections.
To combine multiple images into a single PDF, use the image-to-PDF tool. To extract images from a PDF, the PDF-to-image tool handles the reverse conversion. For web display, converting PDF pages to individual image formats is standard practice.