Adobe PDF

I have used Adobe Acrobat for years, it allows me view electronic documents. Along with downloading and filing it has been a useful tool for me to share information with my students in a text document and to send to others to allow interaction, editing, etc. until the document is complete and ready to be submitted.

In an article written by Duff Johnson there seems to be some concern to the future of Adobe and the PDF format, which is why PDF/A, an open international standard for archiving PDFs, is so important. He poses the solution to the need in the future to retrieve old PDF documents and files and the new systems not being able to open the older documents. This could be devastating for business that relies on archiving information, such as lawyers.

Our ESL department uses Adobe Acrobat to receive government documents and updates for our ESL office from SOESD, in a fairly steady stream of emails. I always forget that the PDF documents are read only and can't be changed. I suppose PDF's have been a way to document words, reports, research and the like and preserve the authors originality. Other than that PDF's are not a very important aspect of interest for me in my work.