PDF stands for Portable Document Format. It is a cross-platform standard developed by Adobe Systems for publishing on the world wide web, marketed under the name Adobe Acrobat.

Acrobat lets you create electronic documents from a wide range of authoring tools, retaining all the original formatting, fonts and layout. For a more in-depth explanation you can go to the Adobe Acrobat Overview page at the Adobe Web site.

In order to view .PDF documents, you need to have the Acrobat Reader installed on your system. The good news is that the Acrobat Reader is free, and can be downloaded from the Adobe web site. It also comes packaged with many software products, so before you try to download the Acrobat Reader, we suggest that you review your recent software purchases (especially Adobe products) to see if it is contained on them. It may already be sitting on your shelf on a floppy or CD.

The Acrobat Reader is available for just about any computer platform, and all are available from the Adobe Web site.

Documents written in the PDF format can be printed with full Postscript quality, viewed as a stand-alone slide show, and searched by keyword. They also take up very little space on your hard drive. There are also plug-ins to Netscape Navigator as well as Internet Explorer that allow PDF documents to be viewed within the browser window, rather than as a stand-alone application.

Once you have loaded the free loader onto your machine you can set the mime types file in your browser to automatically launch the reader whenever a .pdf document is selected (check the documentation for your browser for instructions on how to add this to your helper application list.). You will be prompted to download the .pdf file to your machine if Acrobat Reader is not in the mime types file.