Softi Software

General PDF Information

This page is a guide for users wanting to know more about PDF's as a format for document scanning & archiving.

History of PDF files

PDF's were introduced in 1992 by Adobe as an easy to share document format, PDF stands for 'Portable Document Format' originally PDF's were intended for the pre=press industry and would contain postscript printer & image files so it did not matter what software a design was created in as once converted to PDF it could be sent to your printing company and they could print your magazines, flyers ect.

In 1994 Adobe released the free Acrobat Reader software and in 1995 produced a plugin for Netscape Navigator and PDF's as a web medium for documents was born.

Now PDF's are the most popular format for document exchange over the internet and is used by over 2,400 global goverment agencies for document transfer.

PDF's for Document Archiving

The paperless office is proably still just a dream and we are now using more paper than ever but one area that has been increasingly popular over the last few years is digital document archving. Why keep full filing cabinets of paper taking up office space when you could fit them on 1 or 2 CD's or store the images on a file server.

Historically digital archiving was very expensive & required specialised equipment and the Images were stored in a propritory format which was a problem if you needed to read your scanned documents on a diferent system, shortly after this Tiff images took over and have been very popular for a few years as some systems still use them but now PDF documents are the industry standard for document archiving as they are easy to produce and share as anyone using any operating system can download the free Adobe reader program and read your documents.

 

More info on our Scan to Pdf Software