Are you familiar with the popularity of PDF files?
Do you know that 8 out of 10 times, we use only PDF files for sharing information?
Indeed, we don’t look for alternatives when it comes to sharing documents over word to pdf. But the popularity of PDF files may decline in the future because of the limitations associated with them. Not only that, many tech companies are trying to bring a new file format that can replace PDFs in the coming years if the limitations won’t be addressed properly.
In this article, you will get to know about the meaning of PDFs, and the advantages and disadvantages of PDF files to understand whether PDFs can sustain in our technology-driven society or not. Let’s get started.
PDF Files: How It Started
Speaking technically, PDF stands for “Portable Document Format”, originated by Adobe. The reason behind the creation of PDF was to provide users with a ‘read-only’ documents format that can be easily accessed on all devices, such as PCs, laptops, mobiles, and tablets.
PDF gained huge popularity and users liked it very much. In the present time, you do not even need to keep a PDF viewer to read a document if you are opening it through a browser. However, its feature where you can not edit PDF can be frustrating.
Advantages of PDF files
Protected
If you are looking for a file format for secured and protected documents then PDF is the one. It can easily trace if any alteration will be made to the document. PDF files are also used in courts to present information; hence, you can not judge the security level of PDF files. A person can even put a security password on PDF files to keep them secured.
Compressed
Other file formats can occupy a lot of space, whereas PDF documents are highly compressed and can easily be stored because of their small size without occupying a large space of the device.
Uniform
PDF files have a consistent and uniform layout and it is the same for all devices. This is the reason why it is easily viewed on all device types, whether it be mobile phones or laptops.
Disadvantages of PDF files
Conventional
We have been using PDFs for the past two decades and now it seems to be quite basic. Even the developers of PDF are not making any advancements in PDF file format anymore. This is the reason why people don’t find it much more interesting in comparison to other file formats.
Expenses Involved in Editing
PDFs can not be edited directly. For editing, you will need a PDF editor tool, or a PDF to Word converter, which can prove to be costly. The reason behind this is the ‘read-only’ feature of PDFs that does not allow users to make changes in the PDF files.
Design
Do you know that PDFs are only available in A3 and A4 layouts? Yes, it is true. It hinders the user’s experience when they are forced to zoom in and scroll to find the information they are looking for.
The debate regarding whether PDFs can be replaced or not is endless. However, we know that PDF proves to be very useful to those who use this file format to share read-only documents.
