Adobe Acrobat Writer Software Gives You Options

If you're on the internet, and on a computer, you've worked with a PDF document, either with Adobe Acrobat reader, or some other PDF viewer (Macintoshes have a PDF viewer built into the operating system).

PDF, or Portable Document Format, is made by converting another document into what is, effectively, an encapsulated postscript file with headers allowing it to be displayed.  The conversion software is sometimes called Adobe Acrobat Writer, or Adobe Acrobat Distiller.

This software package is one of the components of Adobe Acrobat Professional, which includes a viewer with several enhanced functions, like the ability to handle form data, and embed Javascript files into Acrobat documents.  Other useful features in Acrobat documents available with the Adobe Acrobat Writer package include the ability to comment and mark up documents for review, and to export those comments to send them back to the content generator.  These are usually sent in a Forms Data Format file, which is considerably smaller than a full on Acrobat file, and allow them to be merged and compared, much the same way that Microsoft Word has merge and compare features.

The actual PDF production element of Acrobat Professional, Adobe Acrobat Writer, works a lot like a print driver.  It shows up as a printer when you try to print the file; there are plug ins to make "Create PDF" an option on the menu task bar.  When the button is pushed, Adobe Acrobat Writer does much the same thing that any other print driver does, collapsing the information in the fonts down to lines and curves and sending it to a print driver as postscript.  As mentioned before, a PDF file is a postscript file with expanded headers.

There are lots of options on Adobe Acrobat Writer, including what format the images are downsampled to, what color space is used (whether it's meant for screen display with the RGB color space, or process color for printing on a printing press.)  You can also have it force all files down to either 16 bit or 8 bit gray scale, and specify whether hyperlinks remain active.

Adobe's PDF format is an important one – it represents the only widely transmitted electronic document format with pagination and other data necessary for printing as the original content formatter wanted it to be.  It's also used as the primary intermediate exchange format for sending files to offset printers.

A lot of programs have PDF export capabilities; for example, Open Office has the ability to export PDF files directly.  MacOS X has had a PDF export ability built in as a system level utility since its release date.  All of these compete with the Adobe Acrobat Writer in basic functionality, but it's the added features (Forms capabilities and the like) that keep Adobe in the lead in this area.