PDF

The Portable Document Format (PDF) was developed by Adobe as a form of electronic paper. They wanted a way to simplify a Postscript document so that it could be viewed and printed on any computer system. The [[Read]] activity permits viewing PDF files; it gains this feature through its use of the [[Evince]] document viewer. PDF documents are very easy to create. Basically any word-processing or drawing program can generate PDF documents by using the Print command. If the user doesn't have a tool like [http://www.cutepdf.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp CutePDF] installed then PDFs can be created by selecting the Postscript print driver (Apple LaserWriter), outputting to a file, loading the file in the free [http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ Ghostview] program and then exporting it as PDF. [[Python]] has excellent support for producing PDF documents using the [http://www.reportlab.org/ Reportlab library]. More info on PDF is available at [[wikipedia:Portable Document Format]] [[Category:File formats]]