Real World Print Production with Adobe Creative Suite Applications

Where Do PDFs Come From?

Acrobat isn’t like drawing or page-layout applications; it’s intended for modifying PDFs. PDF files begin life somewhere else, outside of Acrobat. While Acrobat enables you to create PDFs from a scanner, an existing image, or a Web page, they’re often exported from other applications such as Adobe InDesign or Illustrator. They may be the result of generating a PostScript file and feeding that to Distiller, or they may be created by some other proprietary process, such as the Global Graphics Jaws interpreter used by QuarkXPress 6.0 and later.

Although Adobe Systems originated the PDF concept and its specifications, anyone is allowed to use the information in the publicly available PDF Reference to write software that creates, ...