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HomeFormats.PDFFull

What is a .PDF file?

PDF (Portable Document Format) is a fixed-layout document format for sharing and printing. Created and read by Adobe Acrobat, browsers and countless apps.

Did you know
  • Adobe co-founder John Warnock created PDF in 1993; it became an open ISO standard in 2008.
  • PDF grew out of Adobe’s internal “Camelot” project, which aimed to let any document be viewed and printed on any machine regardless of the originating software.
  • A single PDF can embed fonts, raster and vector images, forms, JavaScript, attachments and even 3D models, all inside one self-contained file.
  • On the web a .PDF file is served with the MIME type application/pdf.
  • Analyser spots a .PDF file by its signature bytes 25 50 44 46 - ASCII for "%PDF".
What Analyser shows you
View pages, extract text and embedded images, run OCR, and read the metadata of PDF documents.
Open a .PDF file
Drag a .PDF file onto the Analyser home page (or tap to pick one). It opens entirely in your browser - nothing is uploaded, there is no account, and it works offline once installed.
Related formats
Browse the full list of supported file types.