PDF - The World's Digital Document [INFOGRAPHIC]

MakeUseOf

By Mark O'Neill

Published Mar 28, 2012

I absolutely love PDF files as they are very practical. They're easy to read, you can encrypt them, sign them, split, rotate and watermark them, merge them, and navigating a PDF is effortless. In fact, you don't really need the very expensive Adobe Acrobat because there are lots of services out there that will create PDF files for you (Office 2007 for example offers on-the-fly PDF creation of all Word files).

I absolutely love PDF files as they are very practical. They're easy to read, you can encrypt them, sign PDFs online, split, rotate and watermark PDFs, merge PDFs, and navigating a PDF is effortless.

In fact, you don't really need the very expensive Adobe Acrobat because there are lots of services out there that will create PDF files for you (Office 2007 for example offers on-the-fly PDF creation of all Word files), extract text, annotate the file, convert the PDF to another format and much more.

Our infographic today comes from Nitro PDF and it illustrates how PDF files are becoming more common in our everyday lives. For example, travel tickets are nearly always emailed to you now as a PDF file, which makes it easy to back them up onto a USB stick. Or theatre & concert tickets for a musician or other performer. PDF has replaced paper in many respects as the new big boy on the block and there's no turning back.

What do you think? Is PDF the format of the future? Or do you see another file format rising up and taking over? Do you think paper is gradually becoming extinct in favour of PDF? Let us know what you think in the comments.

Click on the infographic below to see a larger version

Infographic Source: Nitro PDF