3 Reasons why PDF defines “hardcopy”
PDF is the leading format for digital “hardcopy” documents. It’s universal, secure, and standardized – combining content from multiple sources while ensuring consistent display across devices.
ArticleOctober 10, 2013
3 Reasons why PDF defines “hardcopy”
PDF is the leading format for digital “hardcopy” documents. It’s universal, secure, and standardized – combining content from multiple sources while ensuring consistent display across devices.
ArticleOctober 10, 2013
About Duff Johnson, PDF Association
If you’re not sure whether the world really needs an electronic model for hardcopy documents, read no further; you are too young to “get” this post. No seriously, I’m not going to argue with someone who thinks hardcopy is “so 20th century” – that person probably has yet to file a tax return.
So, leaving that question aside (for now, at least), what’s the right way to go about hardcopy in 2014? Is it PDF, or something else?
It’s PDF.
Reason 1: PDF has all the relevant features
- PDF files are easy to create from any source with extremely accurate and predictable results. Word-processor, CAD, scanner and other sources may be brought together in a single document
- Properly-created PDF files are entirely self-contained; they look the same on every viewer, irrespective of operating system.
- Like paper, PDF files are hard (but not impossible) to alter. Unlike paper, PDF users may opt for advanced security and authentication.
Reason 2: PDF is ubiquitous, non-proprietary, internationally-standardized, technology
- PDF became ISO 32000, the property of the international community, in 2008.
- Thousands of vendors support the technology with their own PDF creation, editing and viewing software
- Almost every desktop or mobile device can display PDF files.
Reason 3: PDF has no competition
- TIFF, JPEG or PNG? These are merely images. There’s no comparison with PDF, which is a complete, full-featured, full-text searchable document format.
- XPS? Back in 2008/2009 XPS was Microsoft’s attempt to create an alternative final-form document format. XPS has more-or-less flatlined since 2010.
- DJVu? A glorified image format, like XPS, DjVu never really got going before it began to sink in 2010.
- AFP? Still used in some mainframe environments, IBM missed their chance to turn AFP into a generic document format back in the early 1990s.
- EPUB? The current darling of publishers, EPUB is (rightly) enjoying success with some books and periodicals. It’s not designed to be a general-purpose document format.
Can HTML documents serve as hardcopy? That’s a subject for a future post …
