PromoTech

For those of you who don't work in the art department, you've probably grown familiar with Adobe's PDF file format by surfing the web — you've run into a site here or there that has documents (often printable ones) in Acrobat PDF format. To read these files, you need Acrobat Reader, which is free, although today many computers come with the ability to read PDF files on their own. Put simply, PDF is a universal file format for documents — put something into a PDF format, and just about anyone just about anywhere can read it, exactly the way you formatted it.

PDF files make a lot of sense for businesses like banks, insurance companies and brokerage firms who need to put legal forms online for their customers to download. PDFs are also useful for anyone who manufactures or sells products and puts a lot of time and money into brochures or sell sheets — the PDF format preserves all the layout, typography and graphics.

But PDF is also enormously useful in a production environment, and more and more companies involved in printing, publishing and (believe it or not) screenprinting and decoration are beginning to use the format in their production workflow. PDF has the advantage of being an open format which can incorporate both vector and bitmap artwork into a single file, and PDF even includes features built specifically for production workflow, like annotation and protection. I'll talk more about how PDF is changing the production world in the next few days; in the meantime, brush up on the advantages of PDF workflow here.