The Portable Document Format (PDF) is the file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a device-independent and display resolution-independent fixed-layout document format. Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a 2-D document (and, with Acrobat 3-D, embedded 3-D documents) that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2-D vector graphics that compose the document.

The PDF combines three technologies:

A sub-set of the PostScript page description programming language, for generating the layout and graphics.

A font-embedding/replacement system to allow fonts to travel with the documents.

A structured storage system to bundle these elements and any associated content into a single file, with data compression where appropriate.

PostScript is a page description language run in an interpreter to generate an image, a process requiring many resources. PDF is a file format, not a programming language, i.e. flow control commands such as if and loop are removed, while graphics commands such as lineto remain.

Often, the PostScript-like PDF code is generated from a source PostScript file. The graphics commands that are output by the PostScript code are collected and tokenized; any files, graphics, or fonts to which the document refers also are collected; then, everything is compressed to a single file. Therefore, the entire PostScript world (fonts, layout, measurements) remains intact.

As a document format, PDF has several advantages over PostScript:

PDF contains already tokenized and interpreted results of the PostScript source code, for direct correspondence between changes to items in the PDF page description and changes to the resulting page appearance.

PDF (from version 1.4) supports true graphic transparency, PostScript does not.

PostScript is an imperative programming language (with an implicit global state), so instructions accompanying the description of one page can affect the appearance of any following page. Therefore, all preceding pages must be processed in order to determine the correct appearance of a given page; each page in a PDF document is unaffected by the others.

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