PDF – The World’s Digital Document [INFOGRAPHIC]

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

PDF The World's Digital Document

Infographic Source: Nitro PDF

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6 Comments

Mark O'Neill

Mark O'Neill is the managing editor of MakeUseOf.com . You can find him on Twitter and Google Plus.

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  • Desdemona March 28, 2012
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    PDFs are literal pains to use on anything except full size monitors. With so many people seeming to opt for tablets and netbooks, I see less use in the future rather than more.

    PDFs are great for forms and will handle scientific notation better than other formats in some respects. But as other formats improve (and particularly as ebook readers proliferate) I see the use of pdf diminishing, not increasing.

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    • Mark O'Neill March 30, 2012
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      I agree that epub files are better for things like e-books but I find PDF’s to be quite pleasant reading on my iPad. Much better than Word files which are an absolute nightmare.

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  • Jessica Tirta March 29, 2012
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    Hello Mark!

    Interesting infographic you have here. I have a piece of content (infographic) that I think you might be interested in. I searched for your email, but couldn’t find it anywhere on the web. Do you have an email I can reach you?

    thanks in advance!

    Best,
    Jessica

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    • Mark O'Neill March 30, 2012
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      Hi yes, it’s mark AT makeuseof.com .

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      • Jessica Tirta March 30, 2012
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        Perfect, thanks Mark! Just sent you an email :)

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  • Sumaiya September 13, 2012
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    i love pdfs…theyre easy and convenient to use and the most important thing to me: they support images :)

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