pdf

Adobe® Portable Document Format (PDF) is the open de facto standard for electronic document distribution worldwide. Adobe PDF is a universal file format that preserves all the fonts, formatting, graphics, and color of any source document, regardless of the application and platform used to create it. Adobe PDF files are compact and can be shared, viewed, navigated, and printed exactly as intended by anyone with free Adobe Acrobat® Reader® software. You can convert any document to Adobe PDF using Adobe Acrobat 5.0 software.

PDF is a particular file format, like eps or native Illustrator files. It just so happens that PDF is built largely on the PostScript language, but it has been taken one step further. PostScript, as I said, was designed to describe a page. PDF does that as well, but beyond this, PDF can also contain information not only related to how a page looks, but also can describe how it behaves and what kind of information is contained in the file. So PDF is a file format that is smarter than EPS. A PDF file can contain fonts, images, printing instructions, keywords for searching and indexing, job tickets, interactive hyperlinks, movies, and so on.