The Portable Document Format or PDF is a very well-known format currently used for managing and archiving information. Our article discusses some of the benefits that PDF files offer, the structure of the PDF file and how to protect the contents of PDF files.
The Portable Document Format or PDF is regarded as the perfect digital replacement for paper, in fact better! PDF files are best known for the document fidelity that they offer – they can present both the content as well as the layout of any document with full fidelity. In addition, they offer facilities such as an easy search feature, interactive forms, ability to include electronic comments and digital signatures, and much more. In fact, the increasing popularity of PDF files over the Internet has meant an increase in the number of vendors supporting PDF as well as developing applications that enhance the use of PDF files. For example, you can find many third-party applications that specialize in PDF backup and PDF recovery assistance ensuring that one does not have to worry about loss of data from PDF files.
PDF files have many advantages over other standard document formats. For example, the software to view PDF files is absolutely free. A user does not have to have the proprietary software used to create the PDF document in order to view it. Not only that – a PDF document can be viewed across almost all platforms without the presentation being affected in any way. Thus the document appears the same regardless of the hardware, software and operating system being used. If you have created the PDF file using a Windows platform and sent it to a user who is using a Linux platform, the person will still have no problems at all in viewing the file. This means that documents can be shared across multiple platforms and even if there is any corruption in the PDF file during transfer over the network, a quick PDF recovery should restore all the data in the file.
Let us now look at the basic structure of a PDF file. It consists of three types of classes of objects – Document, page and content. The document object is the main class and must contain at least one page object. It must also contain a cross-reference table and could contain more information about the document, bookmarks, thumbnails, etc. A page object must contain at least one content object and information such as article threads, annotations, logical page numbers, links, form fields, digital signatures, etc. A content object on the other hand only contains information about the background of the page such as the fonts, images, etc. The best part about using tools such as DataNumen PDF Repair from DataNumen is that they can scan and recover both the text and images from a damaged or corrupt PDF file.
PDF files are some of the most secure and sturdy documents in use today. It is however not unknown for these files to suffer from occasional corruption due to virus attacks or other malicious attacks. They might also get damaged due to sudden hardware problems or software failures. In fact, even if proper backups are taken and stored on external media such as zip disks or CD-ROMs, the media might also get corrupted. Specialized PDF recovery tools such as DataNumen PDF Repair mentioned above can repair PDF files on corrupt media as well making sure that there is minimal data loss.