Portable Document Format (pdf) file is a self-contained cross-platform document. In plain language, it is a file that will look the same on the screen and in print, regardless of what kind of computer or printer someone is using and regardless of what software package was originally used to create it.Although they contain the complete formatting of the original document, including fonts and images, PDF files are highly compressed, allowing complex information to be downloaded efficiently.
PDF is a file type created by Adobe Systems Incorporated. You need a viewer to read the pdf files.And since Adobe released the schema of PDF and postscript (another file format for printing purposes) in the public domain, anybody interested in creating a software for viewing PDF files can easily create one.
Linux being a community effort,there are a number of utilities for viewing PDF files.
The one that come installed by default on most modern linux distributions is GPDF . GPdf is a PDF viewer for the GNOME 2 platform. It has got basic PDF viewing capabilities but not many features . Another PDF viewer is XPDF . Xpdf is not so beautiful to look at. But it has a very functional interface with which you can view the PDF files. An advantage of XPDF over GPDF is that it has got a low memory footprint and so loads very fast even on my machine which has only 64 MB RAM.
Recently Gnome has brought out another document viewer called Evince . Evince is a document viewer for multiple document formats like pdf, postscript and support planned for other formats like multi-page TIFF, DJVU, DVI and Images. Their plan is to replace the multiple document viewers that exist on the GNOME Desktop with a single simple application.
Other PDF viewers that come to mind are ggv (Ghostscript Viewer) and kpdf (pdf viewer on kde). In fact true to the spirit of freedom of choice, there are a plethora of pdf viewers for the GNU/Linux platform and the user can choose to use the one he is more comfortable with.
Till recently Adobe had not released a version of Acrobat Reader (a popular software used to view PDF files) for GNU/Linux. But that has changed now. They have released the Acrobat Reader Version 7.0 for linux (over 30 MB download), which is a very important milestone for the GNU/Linux community because even though Adobe has released only a binary version of their Acrobat Reader, the mere act of releasing a software on this platform strengthens the fact that GNU/Linux on the desktop has come of age and is becoming increasingly popular among the masses. And companies that have a stake in the IT industry cannot afford to sit back and all together ignore this platform.
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