PDF
"What is it? and, How can we use it to our advantage?"

    Well, I've been given the challenge to find out everything, and anything on the PDF format, and how we as a group can learn to format our documents, and grasp the payoff's of using PDF's instead of HTML that way people can D-load the essays, and still have the graphics, charts, and Side material away from the standard Html file.
 
    First off, PDF stands for Portable document format. Also PDF was developed by no one other then Adobe, which in my book makes some very nice programs like Adobe Photoshop, and Acrobat which is the viewer for PDF files.
 
    The Positives, of using PDF format, is this :
1.        Files can be made in Win98, and be viewable on Unix, Linux, and also Mac's. You can also make the files in any of the above, and they will be readable in win98, they are more compact then other formats which can only be read by the O/s (Operating system) that you created it under.

2.       You can add objects into the file, Graphics, Internet links, and also Navigational tools, which in HTML are all, seperate from the HTML document itself.
 
3.       They are formated for both High visiability, and also High-Intensity Printing, so when you go to print them, they don't look blurry grainy or any other sad effects some files have when printing.

4.      You can read them from Adobe Acrobat, also MSIE, and Netscape have it built in to be able to read PDF files.

5.     PDF files are streamable!!! (In Lamens terms: You don't have to wait for the file to finnish it's download before you can read it!)

        Some other nice things, are you can do searches thru the documents much like you do your essays you make in whatever wordprocessor you use. Security, this means you can encode the graphics and text so people can't cut and paste it out, or just save the picture apart from the file without some overly annoying task of breaking thru the file.

    Downsides, like they always said if you go up, you must come down.

1.      Finding a Program to write PDF's is virtually impossible at this time.
 
    Hope to see some more Programmers get there fingers sticky in this awesome format, and hope to see it pop up as a sucess in the market (by this I mean more users, making these files and not just super rich companys), not to mention user friendly.

That was Interesting, but how can I Implement PDF's without learning a new language? 

    According to sources, on PDF files and convertion there are many programs out there to do this for you, much like HTML use to be, before Hotdog Pro and other Webpage designers came out, you had to accually type up your file, in notepad. This made HTML a pain to create and only a couple people accually took the time, to play with it at first, but as we can see from our Exploration into the WWW (World Wide Web) It's everything but small! It's hard to find the information you want, without having to skim thru many other pages. However that is where PDF is different, it never made it off the ground floor, and is still waiting for people to adopt it, and begin using it. 5 Programs listed on the page, were

         However, from the experience with these programs, the Acrobat programs, seemed to be the only software that accually made sense, everything else is for Business like situations, or Mac. Nothing really feasible for the standard end-user. Considering the facts the PDF format, is great for companys, and business like situations, newsletters, brochures come to mind. However the Price tag of $295 US Dollars, makes it almost Impossible for some of us to buy it just to make PDF files, thus we need a cheaper alternative, Rumors of someone taking the challenge to create a Universal Converter to PDF has been noted. But from my essay and research, I consider this format hard to intergrate for basic use, and until situations change, I feel most people will still, stick with the basic Word-Processors, and HTML format.

Final Notes on PDF
    While currently, not practical for non-business enviroments, it is a great way for people to view business newsletters and specs. and even tho we can't make them without extensive hassle, we still can view them, and the best part about it, the viewer is FREE, Thus...it wasn't a total loss for this format to be Introduced, and like many other great inventions, will take time for the general public to become educated about.

    In Time we may be able to look forward to another format, which is even smaller then a PDF file and still has the advantages, just like MP3's for the audio realm, replaced the WAV because of it's compact size and over-all system quality, even tho it's not as clear as WAV the payoff between the size and sound is worth it.

 
Material on this essay was compiled by many references, however I must thank the following for there outstanding information and webpage setup
 
www.pdfzone.com   "For making a deep subject, understandable"
www.adobe.com   "For making me realize that us small end users never will afford there software"

                                                                    (c) 1998, Xomgromit