What is Pdf and It’s history?

Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems (an American computer software company headquartered in San Jose, California, USA. ) in 1993 for document exchange. PDF is used for representing two-dimensional documents in a manner independent of the application software, hardware, and operating system.

Each PDF file encapsulates a complete description of a fixed-layout 2D document (and, with Acrobat 3D, embedded 3D documents) that includes the text, fonts, images, and 2D vector graphics which compose the documents.

In short “PDF” (Portable Document Format) is Adobe(R) Acrobat(R) format. PDF is a proprietary format that allows you to read electronic documents, either on or off line. This format provides a page-by-page view of documents, exactly as they appear in their printed form, as well as allowing keyword search.

Font and graphic information is embedded in the PDF file.
PDF files are based on PostScript, so they print well on almost all printers.

Adobe provides a free Acrobat Reader that allows you to view, navigate, and print PDF files across all major computing platforms. It is the free viewing companion to Adobe Acrobat and to Acrobat Capture(R) software.

The PDF file format has changed several times and continues to evolve, as new versions of Adobe Acrobat were released. There have been nine versions of PDF with corresponding Acrobat releases:

• (1993) – PDF 1.0 / Acrobat 1.0
• (1994) – PDF 1.1 / Acrobat 2.0
• (1996) – PDF 1.2 / Acrobat 3.0
• (1999) – PDF 1.3 / Acrobat 4.0
• (2001) – PDF 1.4 / Acrobat 5.0
• (2003) – PDF 1.5 / Acrobat 6.0
• (2005) – PDF 1.6 / Acrobat 7.0
• (2006) – PDF 1.7 / Acrobat 8.0
• (2008) – PDF 1.7, Adobe Extension Level 3 / Acrobat 9.0

How to deactivate the Adobe Reader Online update?

The most annoying thing for those who use Adobe reader for reading pdf files is the online updater which download updates in the background as it consumes a lot of bandwidth. This is even worse for users with limited usage as the typical update size is about 50-60 MB. There is no such option in adobe readers main menu to stop that online updater.
But you can use following trick to stop it.
First, go to the adobe reader’s plug-ins directory ( typically C:\Program Files\Adobe\Reader 9.0\Reader\plug_ins ) and search the file called Updater.api .
Then delete this file.
If you like to use this feature later then create a back up of the plug-in.