The original goal of PDF was to have a portable print fidelity copy; WYSIWYG for real. You could take a PDF file and print it on a laser printer, a linotype, or a screen and it would look the same.
If you printed it on a postscript printer it would look exactly the same (or better, if you used type 1 fonts).
PDF is pretty much a symbolic representation of what needs to be printed out. It's symbolic so it can get rasterized onto whatever device in question, in a way that should be as accurate as possible to a print version.
That's the primary requirement of PDF, and has been since the beginning.
They added a bunch of interactive stuff to it, which are used occasionally (forms). But to understand PDF you need to understand the above first.
Comments
The original goal of PDF was to have a portable print fidelity copy; WYSIWYG for real. You could take a PDF file and print it on a laser printer, a linotype, or a screen and it would look the same.
If you printed it on a postscript printer it would look exactly the same (or better, if you used type 1 fonts).
PDF is pretty much a symbolic representation of what needs to be printed out. It's symbolic so it can get rasterized onto whatever device in question, in a way that should be as accurate as possible to a print version.
That's the primary requirement of PDF, and has been since the beginning.
They added a bunch of interactive stuff to it, which are used occasionally (forms). But to understand PDF you need to understand the above first.