PDF

MS Technology offers extensive experience working with PDF documents and the various versions associated with PDF documents. MS Technology delivers the highest quality of the PDF file format to your users.

What is PDF?

PDF stands for the Portable Document Format, used to display documents in an electronic form independent of the software, hardware or operating system they are viewed on. Originally developed by Adobe® Systems as a universally compatible file format based on the PostScript format, it has become an international de-facto standard for exchanging documents and information.

PDF files may contain a variety of content besides flat text and graphics including logical structuring elements, interactive elements such as annotations and form-fields, layers, rich media (including video content) and three dimensional objects using U3D or PRC, and various other data formats. The PDF specification also provides for encryption and digital signatures, file attachments and metadata to enable workflows requiring these features.

PDF Advantages:

  • Graphic integrity: A PDF displays the exact same content and layout no matter which operating system, device or software application it is viewed on.
  • Multi-dimensional: The PDF format allows you to integrate various types of content – text, images and vector graphics, videos, animations, audio files, 3D models, interactive fields, hyperlinks, and buttons. All of these elements can be combined within the same PDF file and organized as a report, a presentation or a portfolio.
  • Convenient: PDFs are easy to create, read and use by everyone.
  • Secure: Offers options to set up different levels of access to protect the content and the whole document, such as watermarks, passwords or digital signatures.
  • Compact: Although PDFs can theoretically contain unlimited amount of information, they can be compressed into a file size that is easy to exchange while retaining full control over the level of image quality.

Limitations of PDF:

  • The PDF was developed as an exchange format for documents. The original goal was to preserve and protect the content and layout of a document – no matter what platform or computer program it is viewed on. This is why PDFs are hard to edit and sometimes even extracting information from them is a challenge.
  • Not all PDFs are alike when it comes to working with them. Different types of PDFs require different ways of working with them, for example when searching or extracting information.

MS Technology’s Solutions

MS Technology has extensive experience with the PDF format, including PDF/A and PDF/X, with all of our products including the MST Viewer, eViewer HTML5 document viewer, and MST Batch Converter. MS Technology’s solutions can overcome many of the disadvantages of the PDF format including using our OCR module to provide text search, selection, and extraction; and annotate PDF documents. Our powerful viewers and conversion tools enable you to view, convert, manipulate, combine, annotate, redact and print PDF documents.