Pdf

Why is PDF extension so special? I know it has a "better" screen quality than .doc and .txt files, but how is the print quality? Do documents printed under .pdf have higher quality than .doc and .txt documents?

 

You can print TO pdf if that is what you mean, but no the print quality is dependent on your printer.

 

My guess would be .........

Have you ever opened a 79+ page .doc or .txt file? PDF is VERY organized.

I'm sure there are other reasons but I really don't know the details.

I guess PDF can do what online applications can. IE ... fill in boxes, select ETC: ETC: PDF is good for forms.

 

Main reason I've seen used for PDF's, they are far easier to make uneditable than .doc or .txt

I've seen them used a lot for specifications so that when sent to the client, they can't claim something was in specifications that wasn't.

 

PDFs help protect ownership/editing.

 

PDFs provide consistency of print quality. The way a printed .doc or other format looks largely depends on the application opening the document and the driver of the printer (for example, the same document printed using MS Word 2003 will look different than printed with OpenOffice).
PDF is similar to the PostScript (PS) format, only PDF is newer and looks better on monitors.

 

PDF print quality depends on several things: quality of the PDF (was the original created as a PDF or scanned as a PDF), quality of the printer, etc.

You also have more options when printing PDFs (which can depend on how they were created).

If you are creating documents as PDFs, you can choose to create high-quality, mid-quality, or lower. That can affect how they print, too.

 

There are plenty of advantages to PDF.
The look of your document is consistent. Unlike .doc where it depends on the exact version of Word you have installed, vs the exact version used by the author. With PDF, the document is pretty much guaranteed to look the same with any printer, any printer driver, and any PDF reader. (more or less, anyway).
With .doc, the only guarantee you have is that future versions of Word will be able to open it, and *probably* display it roughly like it used to look.
Apart from this, pdf is an open standard (Not sure if Adobe charge any kind of royalty or license for writing pdf files, but the specs at least are open so you don't need to reverse-engineer 20-year old proprietary binary formats, like with .doc to be able to read it.

but really, the two formats have nothing in common, and are meant for different purposes. PDF is short for Portable Document Format. That is, the entire point is that you have to be able to open the pdf *anywhere*, and anything you need comes with the pdf. (You don't need specific fonts installed, for example). It doesn't matter where the document comes from, how it was written, or which application wrote it. It's portable. And it's the same document you open every time. It looks the same on my Smartphone as on your Acrobat Reader, or when printed out.

.doc simply the format used to store MS Word data. No more, no less. It makes no grand promises of consistent quality, of the document looking the same across different platforms. It just say "You saved this data, so it'll still be there when you load it again.