📄 PDFTools

Understanding PDF: The Universal Document Format

Adobe created the Portable Document Format (PDF) in 1993 to solve a simple problem: a document should look exactly the same on every device. 30+ years later, PDF is an ISO standard (ISO 32000) and the world's most-used document format — over 2.5 trillion PDFs exist globally, with billions more created daily.

PDFs are essentially a container format: they wrap text, fonts, images, and vector graphics into a single file with a predictable structure. This is why PDFs can be merged, split, and compressed without losing fidelity. Each page is an independent object, so extracting pages is just a matter of copying the right objects to a new file.

• PDF/A is the archival format — guaranteed readable for 100+ years. Use it for important documents
• Always run OCR on scanned PDFs — without it, the text is just an image and can't be searched or copied
• Compress PDFs with Ghostscript or online tools — a 10MB PDF can often be reduced to 1-2MB without visible quality loss