The Adobe Acrobat Reader is free software that allows you to read PDF documents. The PDF document is an Internet standard. For example, the IRS distributes its tax return forms in PDF format at their website.
PDF stands for Portable Document Format. Macintosh, Windows, and Unix computers can all read PDF files when running Acrobat Reader. By having all computer platforms understand one common file, disk space is saved, and much work is eliminated.
Because the Acrobat Reader and PDF files are becoming a standard, everyone will soon have the Acrobat Reader on their computer. Also, this method allows quick distribution of documents that change often. For example, the Business and Finance Manual procedures change infrequently, so it is worth converting them into Hyper Text Markup Language (HTML). On the other hand, state airline contract rates change once or twice a year, and it would take many hours to enter this information by hand. By using a scanner and the Acrobat software, it is possible to put this information on the web in less than 1 hour.
The Adobe Acrobat reader is free. You may distribute the reader to as many people as you like. Adobe makes its money by selling Acrobat Exchange, the program which creates the PDF files.
The Adobe Acrobat Reader and PDF files are becoming the Internet standard for document distribution. Also, once the software is installed, no special skills are required to use it.
You may get the free reader from the Adobe website. You can just click on the Get Acrobat Reader button to begin the process of obtaining the software.
Whenever you see a PDF icon like 
, the link to the right of it will contain a PDF document. After clicking
on the link, the PDF file will be loaded into your web browser automatically.
At this point, you may choose to print out the document, or you may try
to view it on your screen.
When the browser is displaying a PDF file, you have several options. You can go forward or backward a page, and you can zoom in or out of the current page.
There are two major reasons why the documents may appear to be less than perfect quality. First, the quality of the original is sometimes received via fax. It is also possible that the original used for scanning purposes is a photocopy. Ideally, if the document was received on disk, then near perfect to perfect quality would be possible.
The scanned in documents do not show up very clearly sometimes on computer monitors. Unclear documents might be made more clear by zooming in. Documents might also appear to be more clear if they are printed out.
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