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Portable Document Format (PDF), standardized as ISO 32000, is a file format developed by Adobe in 1992 to present documents, including text formatting and images, in a manner independent of application software, hardware, and operating systems. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete fixed-layout flat document, including the text, fonts, and other information needed to display it.

PDF was standardized as ISO 32000 in 2008. The last edition as ISO 32000-2:2020 was published in December 2020.

PDF files may contain a variety of content besides flat text and graphics including logical structuring elements, interactive elements such as annotations and form-fields, layers, rich media (including video content), three-dimensional objects and various other data formats. The PDF specification also provides for encryption and digital signatures, file attachments, and metadata to enable workflows requiring these features.

Adobe Systems made the PDF specification available free of charge in 1993. In the early years PDF was popular mainly in desktop publishing workflows, and competed with a variety of formats such as Common Ground Digital Paper, Farallon Replica and even Adobe’s own PostScript format.

In December 2020, the second edition of PDF 2.0, ISO 32000-2:2020, was published, including clarifications, corrections and critical updates to normative references.[13] ISO 32000-2 does not include any proprietary technologies as normative references