The PDF format is one of the main projects of Adobe Inc company – a software development firm from California founded in 1982.
After entering the software market with till nowadays well-known product Photoshop, the company conceived one more revolutionary by that time step. According to John Wornock, one of the corporation leaders: "If you think you have a formula for success, you'd better figure out how to change it from year to year". In 90-s, Adobe achieved significant results by following the above formula - the creation of cross-platform products. The full-fledged result of that work became the PDF (Portable Document Format). The idea of the company was to create a document format that wouldn't require a special processing by the computer, and could be viewed and printed regardless of the installed OS. There were no printing problems thanks to PostScript, but problems arose during the attempt to teach Windows, Max and OS/2 to understand the "same speech".
In 1992 one of the PDF developers - Charles Geschke - was mysteriously kidnapped and returned back. Not dilating on the details of this event, he merely declared the new concept of success: "A computer must work with text, images, video and sound as with one file". So the application allowing us to replay files on Macintosh the same way they were looking on PC that we know as Adobe Acrobat Reader has finally appeared. Despite obvious advantages of the product, it didn't have a wide distribution, and has become popular only with vast development of Internet technologies in the end of 90-s. There are a host of solutions and products to view, edit, convert PDF, and that speaks to its importance and irreplaceability in today's circulation of documents.
In 2007 International Organization for Standardization has approved the PDF format as international document circulation standard ISO 32000-1. Future versions of the format may be added to the standard as complementary parts after a simplified procedure of approval by ISO technical committee.