Where Do PDFs Come From?

Acrobat isn’t like drawing or page-layout applications; it’s intended for modifying PDFs. PDF files begin life somewhere else, outside of Acrobat. While Acrobat enables you to create PDFs from a scanner, an existing image, or a Web page, they’re often exported from other applications such as Adobe InDesign or Illustrator. They may be the result of generating a PostScript file and feeding that to Distiller, or they may be created by some other proprietary process, such as the Global Graphics Jaws interpreter used by QuarkXPress 6.0 and later.

Although Adobe Systems originated the PDF concept and its specifications, anyone is allowed to use the information in the publicly available PDF Reference to write software that creates, reads, or edits PDF files. Given that the PDF Reference is in excess of 1000 pages, it’s clearly not a trivial undertaking.

All PDF-creation solutions are not the same. Some third-party implementations of the PDF specifications, such as those used to generate PDF files from non-Adobe applications, may not fully utilize all the features possible in a PDF file. This is not to imply that non-Adobe methods of creating PDFs are inferior. On the contrary, some commonly used PDF creation tools, such as the Global Graphics Jaws Interpreter, create perfectly good PDF files. But non-Adobe applications may have slightly different controls or options, which makes it challenging to generalize about how, exactly, to go about making a PDF file. For that matter, not all Adobe applications use the same approach when making PDFs, although they all share the common PDF Library.