White paper: Test of time

Much like smartphones and social media, the portable document format (PDF) has existed for a relatively short period of time yet it is now all but impossible to remember how we managed prior to its existence.

The PDF was created in the early 1990s to fix the problem of documents being compatible with only the hardware and software on which they were created. PDFs allowed documents to be standardised and exchanged across multiple formats and devices.

The PDF has, in the intervening three decades, evolved into a far more sophisticated and valuable tool. Computing surveyed 150 PDF software users and decision-makers, representing organisations from a wide variety of industries, including banking and finance, logistics, manufacturing, retail and the government sector in order to gauge the extent of this evolution. Our objectives were to establish the extent to which PDFs are integral to the workflows of organisations today, highlight common objections and misconceptions, and explore how businesses can better exploit the PDF’s enduring potential. The findings also reveal how enterprise PDF software can save time, and money, and reduce carbon footprints.