The history of the PDF and its marketing limitations
The Portable Document Format technology was invented by Adobe Systems in the 1990s. The main motivation behind the invention was to allow individuals and businesses to exchange electronic documents without much hassle. Soon after this technology was invented, it became an invaluable tool for students, designers, teachers, businesses, and marketers among other entities. It became a standard format for creating virtually any kind of document, ranging from menus and mock ups to white papers and case studies.
At the moment, the internet is host to perhaps billions of PDF documents and there are more adding to it every day. In the next section of this article, let us take a brief look at the history of PDF file format.
The history of the PDF
Before PDF was invented, each of the operating systems in existence at the time used different file formats, making it difficult for people to share documents with each other. If you shared a document on the Mac operating system, people who opened it on Windows or MS DOS were not able to view it. This problem was remedied when a co-founder at Adobe Systems called John Warnock assembled a team to create a universal file format.
Warnock’s team set out to create a file format technology that would allow people to share documents across various computing devices and operating systems without the document being changed in any way. In 1993, the first version of adobe was created and it was able to interpret most file formats extant at the time. even though this new technology solved a major business and individual problem at the time, it would be a while before it started to be adopted by the masses. The early versions required people to pay in order to use them and coupled with slow download speeds, PDF’s popularity did not happen immediately after its introduction.
How PDFs are used today
Today, people take PDF for granted not knowing how it touches almost every aspect of our lives. Today, PDFs are used to share high-quality files online, scan paper files into electronic formats, and to maintain the integrity of photos and design. PDFs are no longer used solely in business context like they used to. Everybody has access and uses these file format. Marketers are salespeople use this file format to create different kinds of marketing materials that they share with us to let us know of various products and services
With all these advantages of PDF, it is impossible to imagine that they also have some shortcoming associated with them. Next, let us take a look at some of the shortcomings of PDFs.
The limitations of PDFs
One of the shortcomings that are associated with PDF is the fact that they are not easy to edit. It takes some knowhow in order to be able to effectively edit a PDF document and that can sometimes prevent one from achieving their goals. Unlike word documents, which can be edited easily in a Microsoft Office suite, PDF readers do not lend themselves easily to this function. You might have to use an online PDF to word converter to achieve this.
